President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza emerged as Argentina’s leading electoral force in the October 26, 2025, congressional midterms, a sharp reversal after its September defeat in Buenos Aires province. With 91% of the national vote counted, the libertarian front had 40.8%, the Buenos Aires Herald reported. The result strengthened a presidency that had faced a currency scare, US Treasury intervention and repeated defeats in Congress. But a plurality was not a parliamentary majority: Milei still needed allies to enact tax, labour and budget legislation.
Voters renewed 127 of the 257 lower-house seats and 24 of the 72 Senate seats. The Herald’s election-night projection put La Libertad Avanza at 92 lower-house deputies once the new term began, above the 84 required for a third of the chamber. That threshold matters because overturning a presidential veto requires a two-thirds majority in each chamber. A larger libertarian bloc could block opposition attempts to reverse Milei’s future vetoes, a protection the administration had lacked when Congress overturned his disability-funding veto in September. The precise bloc totals were projections subject to certification and subsequent changes in party affiliation.
The Buenos Aires reversal
In Buenos Aires province, where Peronism had beaten Milei’s allies by about 13 points in a separate provincial election seven weeks earlier, preliminary national figures gave the libertarian list 41.5% against 40.8% for the Peronist coalition, the Herald reported. The races were not identical: one elected provincial and municipal officials, the other national legislators. Nor did a narrow national-ballot lead erase the earlier protest vote. But the change overturned the assumption that the September result would dictate the October outcome.
The libertarians had worked with former president Mauricio Macri’s PRO party in key districts. The governing movement gained a substantially larger bloc, while maintaining a need to negotiate with PRO, centrist radicals and provincial representatives. The Herald reported preliminary turnout of 67.8%, a reminder that a large minority of eligible voters had not cast a ballot. It also reported that the Peronist Fuerza Patria list received 24.3% in the national vote for deputies, while provincial Peronist forces ran separately elsewhere. That fragmentation made raw national percentages an imperfect guide to the opposition’s future congressional strength.
A reprieve with legislative conditions
The election followed an unusual sequence of crises. Opposition forces had won the Buenos Aires province race on September 7, and the peso came under heavy pressure. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent first pledged support and then announced direct peso purchases and a $20 billion swap framework on October 9. Leaked, unauthenticated disability-agency recordings also put people close to Milei under investigation. The result showed that none of these developments automatically cost the government its national electoral coalition. It did not determine the eventual outcome of the investigation or guarantee lasting currency stability.
Supporters could read the vote as a mandate to continue cutting the state and liberalizing markets. Opponents could point to uneven household incomes, pension protests and concern about public-service funding. Those interpretations would meet in Congress, where a bloc large enough to prevent overrides still fell short of the votes required to pass ordinary legislation alone. The government’s immediate task was to negotiate a 2026 budget, build provincial relationships and translate electoral momentum into workable bills.
By election night Milei had secured something he badly needed: more room to survive political shocks and defend executive decisions. Whether he could use that room for durable institutional reform depended on the precise shape of the new chambers, on cooperation from governors and on an economy still exposed to swings in demand for dollars.
