Former candidate Patricia Bullrich asks her voters to support the ultra Javier Milei in the second round

Former presidential candidate Patricia Bullrich, third in last Sunday's elections in Argentina, has announced her support for the ultra Javier Milei in the second round on November 19. The conservative leader said at a press conference that only in this way will the opposition be able to defeat Kirchner's Peronism and its candidate, Sergio Massa. "We have an obligation not to be neutral. Our decision is unilateral, there was no negotiation" with Mieli, explained Bullrich, president of Pro, the Macrist party that is a founding partner of the opposition alliance Together for Change. Bullrich's decision means the de facto fracture of that coalition, which in 2015 brought Macri to the Casa Rosada with the support of centrist parties, such as the Radical Civic Union (UCR).

The announcement by Bullrich and his party, the Pro, is very good news for Milei, who has been engaged since Monday in an accelerated process of public transformation to attract the support of Macrismo. The result, however, is not definitive. Both the UCR and the moderate sectors of the Pro have already announced that they will not support Milei. The same will happen to some of the 6.2 million voters who chose Bullrich's ballot on Sunday, whose loyalty to the political agreements of the leadership is not guaranteed. Milei won 30% of the vote in the first round, against Massa's 36.7%. How many of the Together for Change cake will be able to add in November is still a mystery.

In political terms, in any case, this Wednesday saw the signing of the death certificate of Together for Change, a coalition that was born as a "republican and liberal" alternative to the Peronism of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner. The strategy was successful: Macri became the first non-Kirchnerist president since 2003 and came close to achieving re-election in 2019. The economic crisis blocked their aspirations and finally Kirchnerism returned to power behind Alberto Fernández. The Peronist's administration was a failure and Juntos por el Cambio thought that a return to the Casa Rosada was just one step away. However, Milei intervened. With calls to "exterminate the political caste," dollarize the economy, arm civilians and even promote the sale of organs, the ultra came second on Sunday, behind the Peronist Massa. With no real power in power, Together for Change and also Pro imploded three days after the defeat in the first round.

Ernesto Sanz, leader of the UCR and one of the founders of the alliance eight years ago, had already anticipated that his party would not join in supporting the far-right. "If the parties start to decide different things and don't have the vocation to stay together, it's obvious that they break down. Coalitions are not designed to live forever, they live what their members want," he said Wednesday morning, as rumors of Bullrich's announcement were already circulating.

Bullrich had anticipated on the night of his defeat that his only political objective was to put an end to "populism" that, in his view, Massa and Peronism represent. He didn't talk about Milei, but it was clear that giving his support to the ultra candidate was among his options. It took him a little more than two days to wipe the slate clean with the libertarian, after weeks of insults and even a complaint for libel. Milei said in the last presidential debate that Bullrich was a "bomb-thrower" because of her past in the Peronist guerrilla Montoneros in the 1970s, and accused her of murdering "children in a kindergarten." On Monday, the ultra called for forgetting the grievances of the past and uniting in a single bloc against Massa. On Wednesday, she said they had "forgiven each other" after a personal chat. Milei illustrated the reconciliation on social media with an illustration of a lion and a duck embracing.

pic.twitter.com/YefKdgWQC5

— Javier Milei (@JMilei) October 25, 2023

The Argentine political scene has completely changed. Between the far-right of Mieli and the left of Kirchnerism, a new diffuse space of the center is now emerging that will have to define its political support. The hawks of the Pro, represented by Bullrich and Macri, have already decided on the extreme right. The doves of the party, represented by the head of government of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, and the UCR are torn between giving freedom of action to their voters and organic support for Massa.

There will be another debate in the interior of the country, where there are ten new governors who come from both the Pro and the Radical party. The new territorial chiefs cannot break Together for Change from one day to the next, because governability in their provinces depends on that alliance and their votes in the regional parliaments.

Massa will now have fishing opportunities in the orphans of Together for Change. It also has in its sights 700,000 votes that on Sunday went to the traditional left and another almost two million that bet on Juan Schiaretti, a non-Kirchnerist Peronist who governs the province of Cordoba, the second largest in the country after Buenos Aires.

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