The decisive victory of President Javier Milei of Argentina in legislative elections on Sunday gave him a critical boost, with voters from the mountains of Patagonia to the farmlands in the Pampa casting their ballot to back his sweeping economic experiment.
Some 8,000 miles north of Buenos Aires, in Washington, the Trump administration was also counting it as a victory.
“These results are a clear example that the Trump Administration policy of peace through economic strength is working,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who weeks ago announced a $20 billion lifeline for Argentina, wrote on X on Monday.
“He had a lot of help from us,” President Trump said of Mr. Milei as he traveled in Asia on Monday for meetings with other world leaders. “We’re getting a real strong handle on South America.”
Financial markets reacted euphorically to the results as Mr. Milei emerged from the election with an even tighter bond to the United States and a firmer mandate to pursue more transformative changes to the country’s economy.
The resounding victory was unexpected for Mr. Milei, a libertarian economist who had been facing significant political and financial turmoil in recent weeks. Many voters had grown disenchanted with austerity measures that raised the cost of basic services like transportation and health care.
His success was likely aided by the Trump administration’s intervention, experts said, which prevented a financial tremor caused by a plunge in the value of the local currency from escalating into an earthquake. The financial aid from the United States helped Mr. Milei navigate the legislative elections with some measure of stability.
Mr. Milei also successfully appealed to the fears and memories of many Argentines, experts said, by making the argument that he offers the only path for a country that has undergone years of runaway inflation under high-spending populist governments.
Argentines have grown tired of prices swinging wildly from day to day and of a ruling class many consider to be corrupt and irresponsible.
“Argentines don’t want to go back to the past,” Mr. Milei said in a triumphant speech on Sunday at his party’s headquarters in Buenos Aires. “There are far more Argentines who want to move forward than those who want to go backward.”
During his almost two years in office, Mr. Milei has moved aggressively to shrink the state, slashing federal spending by roughly 30 percent. He laid off around 55,000 public-sector workers, amounting to some 15 percent of the federal work force, as he cut the number of ministries to nine from 19. The country had its first budget surplus in 14 years.
Mr. Milei’s party won over 40 percent of the vote on Sunday, and he has enough support in Congress to prevent his vetoes from being overridden, which had thwarted some of his moves to slim the state.
The result capped a highly polarizing, vitriolic campaign, in which Mr. Milei called his left-leaning rivals “kukas,” a play on the word “cockroaches,” and promoted his brand of capitalism as the scourge of populism and socialism. He contrasted his friendship with America with Argentina’s past alliances with Venezuela.
Voters said that Mr. Milei, despite spending cuts that have hurt many Argentines, deserved the chance to carry out his plans.
“I don’t want to go back to what we had before,” Zulma Fernández, 70, a retiree, said as she left the polls in Buenos Aires after voting for Mr. Milei’s allies.
“We needed change in Argentina,” said Marcelo Masaglia, 54, a store owner.
“Daniel Schteingart, a director at Fundar, a research center in Buenos Aires, said: “People voted out of fear. Fear of destabilization, fear of the return of economic chaos.”
It would have been a much more challenging task for Mr. Milei to continue to present himself as offering financial stability without the Trump administration’s pledge of a $20 billion currency swap, halting a financial free fall.
“It’s hard to imagine a similar result if Milei was engulfed in a financial crisis,” said Benjamin Gedan, senior fellow and director of the Latin America program at the Stimson Center, a research center in Washington. “There’s a pretty direct line you can draw between his visit to Washington and his midterm performance.”
The Trump administration’s deep involvement and interest in Mr. Milei’s fate could play both ways.
“If Milei succeeds, the U.S. will rightly take some credit for it,” Mr. Gedan said. “If Milei’s pro-market reforms crash, then many Argentines will blame the United States.”
The results of Mr. Milei’s cost-cutting experiment remain uncertain. Since being elected in 2023, Mr. Milei has successfully curbed inflation and reduced public spending, reassuring international investors. But Argentina’s economy has recently stalled, inflation remains high by international standards and even though Mr. Milei has managed to reduce poverty, a third of the population remains impoverished.
Mr. Milei, facing fewer Congressional barriers, can now pursue what he has characterized as his “second generation reforms.”
Top priorities include an overhaul of the labor and tax systems, which he says would help Argentina enter “a permanent reform loop.” He has also vowed to pursue broad changes to the pension system.
The centerpiece of Mr. Milei’s plans is a proposal that would make it easier, and cheaper, to hire and fire workers. Roughly half of Argentina’s work force is employed informally, which Mr. Milei and his allies see as evidence that it’s too costly and risky for businesses to take on workers full time.
Mr. Milei also plans to pass a tax bill that would eliminate 20 taxes, lower overall tax rates and broaden the tax base in an effort to simplify Argentina’s byzantine system in which tax evasion is widespread.
“It is clear that we can now move forward more decisively,” Mr. Milei said on Argentine television on Monday. “The worst is over.”
Daniel Politi and Lucía Cholakian contributed reporting from Buenos Aires.
Emma Bubola is a Times reporter based in Rome.
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