It has been a bumpy month for President Javier Milei of Argentina. Despite his success in cutting spending, pulling down inflation and even reducing poverty, his government is irritable.

Concord among normally irreconcilable opposition parties is one source of aggravation. To date, their division has allowed Mr Milei some control over Congress despite his party holding just 15% of seats. On July 10th opposition parties passed increases in pensions and disability benefits. Mr Milei has a veto. The opposition may have sufficient votes to overrule. The peso is a headache, too. Having partially floated it in April, the government keeps intervening to prop up its value and press down on inflation. That hamstrings foreign-reserve accumulation, worrying the IMF and investors. It has sent short-term interest rates soaring and induced spending on imports and foreign holidays, creating a current-account deficit.

Government nerves are fraying. Mr Milei branded his vice-president, who runs the Senate and oversaw the offending vote on benefits, a “traitor”. Karina Milei, his sister and closest adviser, publicly questions the loyalty of other aides. With congressional midterms approaching in October, open infighting is far from ideal. But if the drama is to hurt Mr Milei in those elections, or beyond, the opposition will need a modicum of credibility. Instead, it has looked punch drunk since Mr Milei won the presidency in late 2023 as an angry libertarian outsider. Its recent show of organisation is the exception, not the rule.

Moderate alternatives seem doomed. The centre-right Republican Proposal (PRO) party, run by a former president, Mauricio Macri, was obliterated by Mr Milei’s Liberty Advances party in elections in May in the city of Buenos Aires, normally a PRO stronghold. The PRO hopes to survive through an alliance with Liberty Advances in the elections for Buenos Aires province in September. It may well simply become irrelevant. The contest in all of the upcoming elections is polarised between Mr Milei and Peronism, the amorphous populist movement that has dominated Argentine politics for 80 years. Third parties like the PRO may be squeezed out.

But the Peronists are in disarray, too. Just 29% of Argentines say they will vote for them in the midterms, while nearly 40% plan to vote for Liberty Advances. In June the Supreme Court upheld a six-year sentence for corruption for Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a former president who leads the movement. She is under house arrest and barred from public office. The decision prompted a show of outraged unity among Peronists, but in reality they are still deeply divided. Ms Fernández may aspire to copy Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president, who was jailed for corruption but got his conviction annulled and won power again. But this is very unlikely as she has exhausted all her legal avenues. If she did leave national politics, it might ultimately help the Peronists; though she has a devoted core of supporters, she also carries some weighty baggage.

Other leading Peronists include Máximo Kirchner, Ms Fernández’s son; Axel Kicillof, the governor of Buenos Aires province; and Sergio Massa, economy minister in the previous government. None excites voters. All hail from Buenos Aires, so may struggle with the voters in the rural interior, who include Mr Milei’s firmest supporters, especially young men. Mr Massa has already lost to Mr Milei once, in the presidential run-off in 2023. Three-quarters of Argentines dislike Mr Kirchner, according to a recent opinion poll. Mr Kicillof’s job gives him a high profile, but he is dogged by his involvement in the sloppy nationalisation in 2012 of YPF, the country’s largest energy company, when he was Ms Fernández’s economy minister. It threatens to leave a bill for some $16bn.

All three have endorsed a joint Peronist platform and candidate lists for the upcoming elections for the province of Buenos Aires, but the process of reaching agreement was slow and painful, and nearly collapsed repeatedly. Messrs Kicillof and Kirchner do not get on. Juan Grabois, a hard leftist in a leather jacket who ran in the Peronists’ presidential primary in 2023, stayed out of negotiations. The coming elections should reveal the strengths of the various Peronists vying for ascendancy within the movement before the next presidential election in 2027.

The movement has barely started to discuss its difficulties. “We are like a sick man who won’t go to the doctor,” says Fernando Navarro, who served in the last Peronist government. Some Peronists think they moved too far to the left; others say they they have lost touch with the poor. Few mention their chaotic economic record. Nor do they agree on style. Mr Grabois says they must be as aggressive as Mr Milei, who swears incessantly and insults and threatens rivals and journalists, calling them “eunuch donkeys”, among other things. By contrast, someone close to Mr Massa says the opposition should be “firm but not rude”. There is little focus on ideas. “We either repeat phrases from [Juan] Perón from 50 years ago…or we snipe at colleagues,” says Mr Navarro.

One good reason for the Peronists to worry is the sense that Argentine attitudes have profoundly changed. In 2011 some 70% of Argentines “wanted to live in a country where most things are done by the state rather than the private sector”, according to Isonomía, a pollster. By 2024 that number had fallen to 42%. Some Peronists starting to echo the libertarian, anti-statist Mr Milei. “It’s true that fiscal balance should be a golden rule,” says the person close to Mr Massa.

The leading Peronists will highlight unemployment and shrinking state pensions, but for now their main strategy is simply to hope that Milei stumbles dramatically before 2027. A crisis triggered by a volatile exchange rate is not unimaginable. Yet voters who tire of Mr Milei may simply stay home—or look for another new face. That could open the door to an ambitious provincial governor. Those from different political parties have a history of working in concert to oppose the presidency. Such a group helped push the recent spending increases through Congress. Keep an eye on Martín Llaryora of Córdoba and Maximiliano Pullaro of Santa Fe, says Ana Iparraguirre of GBAO, a pollster.

For his part, Mr Milei is both furious at the opposition for trying to increase spending and extremely confident about the midterms. “Fuck around all you want. I’ll see you on December 11th,” he raged at the opposition on July 9th, naming the date Congress must reassemble after the elections. He says he will reimpose his spending cuts “after we crush them”.

Mr Milei is well placed, but expectations are high. He must work with the opposition after the midterms, no matter the outcome. Only a third of the seats in the Senate and half of those in the lower house are up for grabs, and Mr Milei has only a few lawmakers now. His ability to legislate by decree, granted to him by Congress in 2024, expired on July 8th. That makes his scorched-earth approach risky. For a chance to truly crush the opposition, he must wait for the general election in 2027. His own job will be on the line then, too. ■