The changing of the guard.

Photo: Rodrigo Gonzalez en Unsplash.

This week Buenos Aires is once again in full election mode for the September 7^th mid-term legislative elections. Against the background of ever-growing accusations of corruption against President Javier Milei and his inner sanctum, the President himself is desperately attempting to hammer the final nail into Kirchnerism, the political power which has dominated Argentina for the last twenty years.

Indeed, Kirchnerism, that peculiar local blend of Peronist nostalgia, clientelism, and anti-neoliberal bombast, faces a reckoning in the upcoming elections. Cristina Kirchner, the twice ex-President and one-time Vice-President is under house imprisonment, ironically enough for having been found guilty in the first of several corruption cases against her. Her party, rudderless, is now pseudo-led by the highly unpalatable triumvirate of Sergio Massa, ex-Minister of Finance who squandered billions of dollars in his failed attempt to be elected President in 2022, Axel Kicilloff, the ex-ex-Minister of Finance who squandered billions of dollars along with Cristina in the illegal expropriation of YPF, and Máximo Kirchner, Cristina’s son and head of the Campora, Kirchnerism’s once powerful political acolytes and fixers.

Once all were touted as heirs to the throne, now they, along with Cristina, are a fragile coalition of political desperation, waiting to learn their fate. There is a parallel, if they want to see it, a portent from the north. Less than two weeks ago, there were elections in Bolivia, and Evo Morale’s party MAS (Movement for Socialism) was finally led to rest as two more right-wing candidates contest the ballotage.

Of course, the question is not whether Bolivia’s results map neatly onto Argentina’s; they don’t. The question is what they reveal about the region’s broader political development from the so-called Pink Tide of the early 2000s, when the Latin American Left came to prominence, and now are not so gently fading into the night.

Two decades ago, Latin America’s Left was on the march. Hugo Chávez thundered from Caracas about Bolivarian revolution and Yankee imperialism; Evo Morales, a coca-grower from the Bolivian highlands, became the country’s first Indigenous president; Néstor and then Cristina Kirchner wrapped themselves in the Peronist flag, claiming a mandate to restore Argentina’s dignity after the 2001 meltdown. The common enemy was clear: the “Washington Consensus” of privatization, deregulation, and fiscal rectitude. The common promise was also clear: sovereignty, inclusion, dignity for the poor.

The personal ties were not incidental. Chávez and Morales were frequent guests in Buenos Aires, warmly embraced by the Kirchners as fellow travelers in the struggle. Summits were filled with shared rhetoric about independence from the IMF, solidarity among peoples, and the dawning of a Latin America freed from neoliberal shackles. ALBA, Petrocaribe, endless talk of regional integration: the 2000s were a carnival of revolutionary posturing, lubricated by high commodity prices and cheap Chinese credit. But if the Pink Tide was a family reunion, it was one where each branch of the clan brought very different recipes to the table. And the differences mattered.

In Bolivia, Morales’ MAS was more than a party: it was a social movement rooted in Indigenous identity, trade unions, and peasant federations. Morales embodied a historic inversion: for the first time, the long-marginalized Indigenous majority ran the state. This gave MAS a legitimacy — and a fervor — that Argentina’s Kirchnerism never possessed. MAS rallies were pilgrimages, Morales a near-messianic figure, the wiphala flag fluttering alongside the Bolivian tricolor as a symbol of reborn national pride.

Yet loyalty founded on identity is brittle once disillusion sets in. Morale’s decision to override constitutional term limits in 2019, insisting on an endless mandate from history, cracked the spell. The protests that followed revealed that even Indigenous legitimacy has its limits. The recent election confirmed this: MAS is no longer untouchable.

Argentina, by contrast, has no Indigenous majority to rally. Kirchnerism’s base has always been a more traditional Peronist blend: industrial unions, welfare recipients, middle-class nostalgia, and clientelist machinery powered by state patronage. It is durable, yes, but transactional rather than spiritual. Nobody sings hymns to Cristina with the same fervor that Bolivians once chanted for Evo.  Finally, when the money runs out, loyalty runs thin.

The sharpest contrast between Morales’ Bolivia and Kirchnerist Argentina lies not in their rhetoric — both decried neoliberalism with gusto — but in their economic stewardship.

Morales, for all his populist theatrics, relied on an unexpectedly orthodox finance minister: Luis Arce, later his presidential successor. Arce kept budgets balanced, accumulated reserves, and managed Bolivia’s gas boom with prudence. Morales nationalized hydrocarbons, yes, but then presided over years of growth, poverty reduction, and stability. The MAS project had credibility because it was solvent.

Argentina’s Kirchners took the opposite path. Flush with soy dollars in the mid-2000s, they chose heterodoxy: heavy subsidies, creative statistics, capital controls, and a war against the markets and the farmers. Inflation, always Argentina’s old demon, returned with a vengeance. By the time Cristina left office in 2015, the country was once again teetering on the edge of crisis — the familiar tango of boom, bust, and blame.

That divergence explains a lot. Morales could claim to have lifted millions from poverty through stability. The Kirchners, meanwhile, bequeathed Argentines the world’s most creative euphemisms for inflation.

No account of the Pink Tide is complete without the Venezuelan specter. Hugo Chávez was its thunderous prophet, showering petrodollars on allies, buying influence with cheap oil, and promising to liberate the hemisphere. The Kirchners basked in the glow, Morales reveled in solidarity.

History can be unkind. Venezuela collapsed into corruption, repression, and mass exodus under Chávez and his hapless heir, Nicolás Maduro. If Chávez was once the patron saint of the Latin American Left, today he is its ghost — a cautionary tale of how revolutionary promise curdles into ruin.

Crucially, however, Argentina in 2025 no longer fears “becoming Venezuela.” That trope, popular a decade ago, has lost its bite. The electorate knows the country’s malaise is homegrown: inflation, corruption, and decades of improvisation of policy. Venezuela now serves only as historical backdrop, a reminder of the family Argentina once kept, and to which it decidedly has no wish to return, even if many Argentines are tiring of Milei’s aggressive posturings, compounded now by strident and very suspiciously timed accusations. Plus ca change.

The fates of MAS, Kirchnerism, and Chavismo are linked not by ongoing coordination but by parallel decline. Each rose on the tide of commodities, charisma, and anti-neoliberal fervor. Each fell victim to overreach, corruption, or economic mismanagement.

Morales eroded his moral authority by refusing to leave office. Chávez and Maduro destroyed Venezuela with authoritarianism, cronyism, and a hideous alliance with drug cartels and the security forces. Kirchnerism squandered Argentina’s good fortune with fiscal pyrotechnics and institutional decay. What unites them now is not solidarity but exhaustion.

The Bolivian election underscored this: MAS, once the embodiment of Indigenous pride, is now just another tired governing party, punished at the ballot box. Argentines see a similar script: a Peronist movement that long claimed to be the people’s tribune, now exposed as a caretaker of decline.

So, what does Bolivia tell us about Argentina? Not that history repeats itself in lockstep, but that it rhymes. The MAS setback is another marker in Latin America’s shift: voters are no longer impressed by ideological bombast or nostalgic promises. They demand competence, growth, and most elusive of all, a reasonable modicum of honesty.

Argentina faces its own reckoning. Bolivia reminds us that even deeply rooted populist movements can stumble once their spell is broken. Argentina is already there.

Buenos Aires, August 2025.