Buenos Aires, Argentina — La Libertad Avanza, the libertarian political party of firebrand President Javier Milei, won big in legislative elections in Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, on Sunday. Milei hopes to ride his party’s success into midterm elections this October.
Half of the city’s 60 legislative seats were being contested, and La Libertad Avanza won 11 of them, including Manuel Adorni, President Milei’s spokesman, receiving 30.13% of the vote.
The strong victory both marked a win for Milei in his first major political contest since taking office in December of 2023, as well as a shift away from the center-right Republican Proposal (PRO) party, which had governed the capital for the past 20 years.
Behind Adorni, Leandro Santoro, a Deputy in Argentina’s Lower House and member of Unión por la Patria, received 27.35% and his party snagged 10 seats, while Silvia Lospennato, also a member of the Lower House and a PRO party candidate, came in third with 15.92%, with PRO winning just five seats.
Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, a former Buenos Aires mayor who broke with PRO leadership in March (after spending 2024 distanced from the party), finished fourth with 8.08% of the vote and secured three seats. The Workers’ Leftist Front received 3.16% and won one seat. A dozen other colorful candidates failed to reach the 3% threshold required for legislative representation.
Local interest in the elections was lukewarm, with turnout 13% lower than the last elections in 2021. This was partly attributed to PRO’s decision to separate the vote for local representatives from the October national midterm elections. The move was an effort to boost PRO party leader and former President Mauricio Macri’s standing ahead of likely negotiations with President Milei to form an alliance in the Buenos Aires Province. However, with La Libertad Avanza nearly doubling PRO in Sunday’s votes, the merger between the two parties will more likely resemble a takeover.
“This is a key day for the ideas of freedom,” said a euphoric Milei at a campaign party Sunday night in Buenos Aires. “This was no local election. It was a choice between two models: impoverishing Kirchnerism or freedom. And freedom won, once again,” he added, referring to the political movement of Néstor and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
In the runup to elections, the president treated the local race as if it were a national issue, joining Adorni on campaign tours across the city. In contrast, the PRO party leadership, perhaps thinking it could capitalize on its long-standing tradition for governing the city, was slow to prop up its candidate, with former President Macri only appearing alongside Lospennato in the final weeks of the race.
Meanwhile, Santoro, the Unión por la Patria candidate, attempted to downplay his ties to the Justicialist Party, which normally doesn’t fare well in Buenos Aires elections. His campaign focused on local issues, including the state of the public health system, waste collection, and the PRO’s neglect of the city’s subway network. Santoro led most polls in the weeks leading up to the election, but the libertarian effort to associate him with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner may have swayed voters against him in the final days of the campaign.
“PRO as a political project has stopped representing a majority of porteños,” Santoro said, referring to Buenos Aires residents. “We understand the importance of the results, but we also uphold the principle that led us into politics, the search for a more just society,” he added.
Dirty campaigning
The election was overshadowed in its final hours by a political scandal. Artificial intelligence–generated videos featuring Mauricio Macri and Silvia Lospennato falsely claimed they were withdrawing from the race and endorsing Manuel Adorni.
The videos circulated widely on X Saturday evening, despite a legal ban on political campaigning during that period, and were amplified by libertarian-aligned accounts.
The PRO’s legal team quickly filed a petition with the judiciary, prompting a local court to order X to remove the videos.
By then, the messages had already circulated widely, though it remains unclear whether they influenced the outcome of the vote.
“This was madness, it broke every rule in the book. We’ve never had to call the media to denounce an attempt at fraud,” Macri said Sunday morning.
Libertarians didn’t claim authorship of the videos, but they qualified them as humorous in nature. “They should stop crying, they are made out of crystal,” replied Milei, who called Macri “a crybaby”.
