What Milei can learn from elections in Brazil and United States

The streak of elections in Brazil and the United States did not turn out as President Javier Milei had hoped. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva unexpectedly turned the game around in the second round and Flávio Bolsonaro fled the country, while Donald Trump took a beating in the midterms and is entering a weakened lame-duck period. But both elections also delivered good news and useful lessons for Milei as his own re-election bid nears.

Brazil shows that incumbents can win. This obvious precedent, after a string of elections in the region in which the opposition emerged victorious, adds to the fact that Lula used the fear of Bolsonaro as a narrative tool. Unless the opposition stages a quick renewal of its leadership, which seems unlikely at this point, Milei will be able to play the card that he received the country in a virtual state of hyperinflation in December 2023.

Trump, on the other hand, paradoxically suffered in his midterms the pain he spared Milei in Argentina’s 2025 midterms. Trump was the architect of his own misery: his approval ratings were already low before he started the war on Iran in February this year, but they sank even lower afterward, as higher fuel prices pushed up the cost of living further.

What did not change were Trump’s words. One of the greatest drivers of voting sentiment when you are in office is the gap between narrative and reality. The more you tell the public everything is great, the more voters are inclined to contrast those words with their daily reality. Trump kept telling US voters that he had already made America great again, that he was getting all the oil the military could get from Venezuela and that Iran was about to surrender to his mighty force. Yet prices at the pump kept going up.

This is a very simple lesson for Milei, who has spent most of 2026 in denial about the economic problems facing many Argentines, including a lot of the voters who backed him in 2023. Pundits in the US coined the phrase “affordability crisis” to refer to households not making ends meet: Making America great again was not making Americans great again. Last we heard, Milei laughed at the notion that many Argentines “no llegan a fin de mes,” or don’t make it to the end of the month. In several recent speeches, the President said it was stupid to argue that. “If people were not making ends meet, there would be corpses all over the place,” he has said, more or less, in different versions.

The Milei administration still has time to bridge the dissonance between speech and reality. Argentina’s economic performance is mediocre and that has an impact on wages, jobs and overall standards of living. 

There are some incipient moves in that direction, still too timid – even reluctant. If not the President himself, his sister, Chief-of-Staff Karina Milei, opened a business matchmaking event in Rosario last week to connect some 2,500 small companies with the large projects that are getting major tax benefits under the government’s RIGI pro-investment programme. Karina read a speech in which she said that the government wants the economic programme to be a “win-win” equation for both large and small businesses.

This might seem like sensible, normal language for any government, but it has not been the norm in the Milei universe. The President has said time and again that businesses incapable of adapting to global competition should go extinct and that this would be a good thing.

In line with that, Economy Minister Luis Caputo announced this week at the UIA manufacturing association’s annual conference that the ARCA tax bureau would freeze tax enforcement proceedings against struggling SMEs for a few months. The government is still not giving small businesses a reason to live, but it is at least throwing them a lifeline.

Milei and the ruling party, however, are not the only ones who can draw lessons from foreign elections. The Peronists embraced the Brazilian and US elections as a breath of fresh progressive air that fuels their hopes for next year. Both former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and two-time presidential candidate Sergio Massa hurried to meet with André Janones, the person behind Lula’s digital campaign, the man credited with turning the election around. They also rushed to copy the Lula’s Army model of WhatsApp messaging by creating a Peronist Army group.

The Peronists are, again, putting the cart before the horse. A digital strategy is the last piece of a puzzle that starts with sorting out their messy leadership battle, which includes a jailed and banned leader and a candidate without broad party support, plus endless infighting.  The Peronists would do better to look at the US Democratic Party, also split between a centrist and a more left-leaning faction. But unlike the party up north, the Peronists do not have any rising stars yet.