Interview: Argentina’s revolutionary left and the fight against Milei

Argentina embodies political polarisation. On the one hand, it has a far-right president, Javier Milei, committed to slashing social spending and imposing reactionary and authoritarian policies on the country. On the other hand, it is home to what is probably the largest Trotskyist milieu in the world today. The Workers’ Left Front—Unity (Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajadores—Unidad, FIT-U), which brings together four such parties, has four seats in the country’s Chamber of Deputies. Matías Maiello is a member of Argentina’s Socialist Workers Party (Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas, PTS). He spoke to Liam Winning and Joseph Choonara from International Socialism about the situation in the country today and the prospects for the left.1

ISJ: Javier Milei took office as president of Argentina in December 2023, promising a radical right-wing and authoritarian agenda, with libertarian and neoliberal economic policies as the cornerstones of his administration. How do you characterise Milei and his government? Where do they fit within the spectrum of right-wing forces currently operating around the world? And what is his base of support in Argentine society?

Matías: Javier Milei’s government can be characterised as a far-right experiment emerging within what, borrowing a concept from Antonio Gramsci, we might describe as an “organic crisis” affecting Argentina. It represents not merely a radical neoliberal programme but an attempt to resolve that crisis in a reactionary manner through a structural reconfiguration of the country favouring finance capital, extractivism and subordination to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It combines an intensified form of neoliberalism with Bonapartist tendencies: concentrating power in the state’s executive, strengthening repressive measures and curtailing civil liberties.2 We could define it as a form of “authoritarian neoliberalism”: neither classical fascism nor traditional neoliberalism, but a radicalisation of neoliberalism along authoritarian lines.

Argentina is being watched by the global right as a laboratory. Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and other reactionary figureheads give Milei strong backing. Milei’s project is distinct within the new global radical right insofar as it isn’t based on nationalism or protectionism—as is often the case with the right in the imperialist countries—but rather on an ultra-liberal agenda wholly subordinated to US imperialism and international finance capital.

Milei’s support base has evolved over time. The 2025 elections saw him lose ground among impoverished sectors of society, while he absorbed the anti-Peronist right-wing vote traditionally associated with the middle classes.3 His economic programme was on the verge of collapse at the end of last year and only Trump’s intervention saved it.4 The model of financial accumulation and commodity production geared towards exports has created a two-speed economy. On the one hand, substantial profits are made in agribusiness, mining, hydrocarbons and financial speculation; on the other, there are falling wages, declining consumption and job losses.

Today, Milei’s support is in decline, with disapproval ratings around 65 percent.

ISJ: What is the situation in the labour movement? Who is opposing Milei’s agenda, and how successful have those struggles been? We know that, for example, there was a national strike against new labour laws in February 2026.

Matías: You can only understand why Milei was able to advance his programme this far if you grasp the unstable balance that his government rests on. Although the big bourgeoisie and international capital back him, until the most recent parliamentary elections, Milei had only a very small bloc in the National Congress. He lacks any capacity to mobilise supporters and his control of the streets relies on the repressive apparatus of the state—which is itself incapable of containing mass mobilisations—and he virtually lacks a party of his own. In this context, the role of Peronism has been crucial in sustaining his government. While one sector of Peronism conducted rhetorical opposition, another gave the government’s main reforms decisive parliamentary support. Special mention should also be made of the CGT trade union bureaucracy, which refused to confront Milei and is now deeply discredited, much like Peronism as a whole.5

Milei’s programme met resistance from the outset, but this was scattered. There was opposition to his austerity packages: massive demonstrations in defence of public universities; the important struggle at Garrahan, the country’s leading paediatric hospital; actions by the disability rights movement; pensioners’ struggles; and workplace disputes against redundancies and factory closures. These struggles did not defeat the government’s programme but gradually undermined support for it.

In a way, the struggle against labour reform marked a turning point. All the main actors showed their true colours. The government made clear that for it, nothing is untouchable: not only does it seek to reduce the working class to a condition of slavery, it also refuses to implement legislation that has already been passed, such as disability rights and the higher education funding laws. The CGT showed no intention of organising any serious fightback, while sections of Peronism played a key role in ensuring that labour reforms advanced through parliament. In response, the PTS launched a major campaign of agitation against the labour reform, with initiatives that had a significant impact. We initiated coordinating bodies across Greater Buenos Aires and other parts of the country to prepare for the struggle, seeking to group together workplace committees, delegates and activists. On 11 February 2026, despite the CGT’s refusal to call workers to walk out, thousands confronted police repression in the Plaza del Congreso in the capital. Yet, the outrage extended far beyond those who were able to take part in the mobilisation. Milei succeeded in imposing the reform but paid a considerable political price, as did those who enabled him.

ISJ: One of the salient features of Argentine politics has been the electoral success of Trotskyist organisations. Could you tell us about the FIT-U project and the role of the PTS within it?

Matías: The history of the Argentinian left has been marked by a constant oscillation between the two main poles that have traditionally structured politics in our country: the Peronist camp and the republican-liberal camp. A large part of the broader left ended up aligned with Kirchnerism, which absorbed the energies of the 2001 uprising after they were deflected and coopted much of the social and human rights movements.6 Swimming against the tide, in 2011, the PTS, the Workers Party (Partido Obrero, PO) and Socialist Left (Izquierda Socialista, IS) formed the Workers Left Front, with a programme whose strategic horizon is the struggle for a workers’ government. The Workers Socialist Movement (Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores, MST) later joined, and the coalition became known as the Workers’ Left Front—Unity (Frente de Izquierda y de Trabajadores—Unidad, FIT-U).

Trotskyism in Argentina has a long tradition, dating back to the 1930s, but never before had the Trotskyist left maintained such a sustained presence on the national political stage. Today, the national political landscape is made up of the right, the far-right of Milei together with Macrism; Peronism, a genuine centre-left, no longer exists; and, defying expectations, a clearly identifiable “class-struggle left”.7

There are new political developments involving Myriam Bregman, the PTS’s principal spokesperson. At present, this is expressed primarily in terms of political sympathy, or what pollsters refer to as “favourability ratings”. However, several polls have also placed her presidential voting intention rate at between 9 and 14 percent. Discussion of this phenomenon—the growing popularity of a radical left-wing figure—has spread to journalists, political analysts, intellectuals, activist milieus and even, reportedly, bourgeois circles. One of the most widely discussed findings came from the Brazilian polling firm Atlas Intel, the same company that previously anticipated Milei’s rise. The survey shows a 47 percent positive rating for Myriam and a 46 percent negative rating, making her the only major figure in Argentinian politics with a net positive public image. She ranks ahead of Axel Kicillof, Cristina Kirchner, Patricia Bullrich and Milei himself.8

To make sense of this, one has to start from the class struggle under Milei’s government, including the battle against the labour reform. It can be seen as a political expression of the conclusions that broad sectors of the working class, young people, the feminist movement, as well as cultural and intellectual circles, have drawn from two years of struggle. Throughout that period, Myriam and the PTS were visible on the front line, while significant sections of Peronism and the trade union bureaucracy helped sustain the political balance that enabled Milei to advance his agenda.

Neither can this development be separated from international trends. Since the 2008 crisis, we have witnessed political surges not only on the right but also on the left, reflecting significant shifts in political consciousness. These processes have been heterogeneous and contradictory, shaped by very different political organisations. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority has been channelled into neo-reformist formations that separate politics from class struggle, such as Podemos in the Spanish state, Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, Syriza in Greece and Gabriel Boric in Chile.

The distinctive feature of the political developments now emerging in Argentina is that they revolve around the Trotskyist left. This is no accident. Fifteen years ago, the revolutionary left established the FIT-U, which has functioned as a pole of class independence within national politics.

ISJ: How does the PTS relate to the other forces within FIT-U? What’s the degree of coordination in the struggle against Milei?

Matías: Practical coordination with the other organisations within FIT-U does exist, but it is shaped by genuine strategic differences. We engage in joint action in parliament, where we maintain an independent position both from the government and from the Peronist opposition, as well as in a range of conflicts. At the same time, we conduct public polemics: with IS and the MST over their support for the Ukrainian camp aligned with NATO, and with the PO over its methods in the trade unions and the unemployed workers’ movement, which are a hindrance to democratic self-organisation. The prominence and sympathy that the left currently enjoys in national politics did not appear out of the blue. It is also the product of these political struggles over what orientation the left should have. What is taking place today is, in a sense, the culmination of a long process.

One distinctive feature of the PTS, as well as of the international tendency to which we belong, the Current for Permanent Revolution—Fourth International (Corriente Revolucion Permanente—Cuarta Internacional, CRP-CI), is consistently struggling for grassroots self-organisation, opposing all fragmentation imposed by bureaucratic leaderships on the movements, whether on the labour, student or social front. The struggle for workers’ democracy and for coordination among industries engaged in struggle or occupying advanced positions in different arenas is, for us, central to overcoming bureaucracy. This flows from our strategic perspective, which ultimately involves the construction of workers’ councils—“soviets”, to use the transliterated Russian term—for overthrowing the capitalist state. Without these struggles, the emergence of the working class as a hegemonic agent is impossible.

Electoral advances and the shifting balance of forces within FIT-U can’t be separated from cycles of class struggle and the forms of political intervention pursued by each tendency. The PTS first became closely associated with the wave of factory occupations and workers’ self-management initiatives following the 2001 crisis, one of the most emblematic examples being the Zanon factory. Subsequently, between 2005 and 2014, Argentina experienced an extensive upsurge of rank-and-file trade unionism, which included major strikes at multinational companies such as Kraft, RR Donnelley and Lear. Within this process, the PTS converged with an anti-bureaucratic sector that advocated coordinating the struggles and maintaining its independence from the Kirchner government.

The 2015 presidential primaries brought into the open a conflict between the different strategic orientations within FIT. After the PO rejected Nicolás del Caño as Jorge Altamira’s vice-presidential running mate, we moved to an internal process for selecting candidates, in which the PTS list headed by del Caño prevailed.9 This outcome flowed from the prominent role played by the PTS in the intense social struggles of that period, around which del Caño emerged as the main figure of the Argentinian left. To give just one example, the 2014 dispute at the multinational company Lear featured 21 blockades of the Pan-American Highway—one of Argentina’s principal motorways—16 national days of action with pickets across the country, five major episodes of state repression, two weeks of lockout by the bosses and efforts by the Kirchner government to break the strike by importing wire harnesses from abroad.10

At the same time, in 2014, we launched La Izquierda Diario (The Left Daily), the first digital newspaper of the left in Argentina, with the aim of establishing our own voice in the national political debate with the ambition of competing with the bourgeois media. This was not merely a national initiative but one developed collectively by our international tendency. We built a network of 14 publications, operating in seven languages. Each organisation within the CRP-CI maintains its own digital newspaper, making it possible to follow their political activity on a daily basis from anywhere in the world. In Argentina’s case, to give some indication of its reach, La Izquierda Diario currently records around one million page views and more than 500,000 unique users per month. It also forms part of a broader integrated multimedia network. Alongside this, we place considerable emphasis on theoretical struggle, through magazines such as Ideas de Izquierda (Ideas of the Left), which provide a forum for debate on a wide range of theoretical questions. They also feature contributions from many intellectuals beyond the ranks of the PTS and the Leon Trotsky Centre for Studies, Research and Publications—which has become an important institution throughout Latin America—or IPS Editions, a publishing house with more than 100 titles covering a wide variety of subjects.

I mention all of this to explain the role of the PTS. Our work extends beyond intervening in elections, trade unions or student milieus. Our goal is to contribute to the formation of a workers’ and youth vanguard grounded in revolutionary Marxism, despite all the difficulties involved in pursuing such a project in the period following the fall of the Berlin Wall. We believe these efforts are now bearing fruit.

ISJ: Can you say a bit more about how the popularity of Myriam Bregman has helped the PTS broaden its support?

Matías: As well as serving as a spokesperson for the PTS, Myriam is one of the leading figures in the women’s movement, which remains a major social force in Argentina. She is also one of the lawyers involved in the trials of those responsible for the crimes of the 1976 military dictatorship, a cause that continues to hold deep significance in our country.

She is just the most visible sign of a broader political trend. For example, in one of the most recent surveys conducted by the University of San Andrés, Nicolás del Caño appeared among the five opposition political figures with the most favourable public image in Argentina. What is new about this situation is that, although these are still only measures of public image rather than voting intention, they have a national character. We had already seen indications of this in the Jujuy province, where Alejandro Vilca won 25 percent of the vote for the Chamber of Deputies in 2021. Although he was not subsequently re-elected, he continued to secure around 10 percent of the vote. The 2025 elections also reflected some of the tendencies that are becoming more evident today. In Buenos Aires Province, the list headed by del Caño won two seats in the National Congress, while Bregman secured 9 percent of the vote in the City of Buenos Aires.

Our wager is that this trend will also find expression in the class struggle, and we are preparing accordingly. We have launched an initiative to build committees across the country to organise the support we are receiving. Prominent figures from the worlds of culture, the arts, literature and academia are working alongside us to advance this project. Either we transform sympathy into organisation or we will fail to rise to the challenge of developing a class-struggle left that can decisively influence political events. Milei’s government is in deep crisis, yet it continues to press forward with systematic attacks. The passivity encouraged by Peronism and the trade union bureaucracy is a serious problem. To the thousands of people now moving leftwards, we say that it is necessary to replace the scepticism and demoralisation fostered by bureaucratic leaderships with our own institutions, which must be capable of promoting direct action as a means of defeating Milei. The committees we propose are not meetings to wait for the next elections in 2027. Our goal is that these committees should intervene in the struggles taking place and to promote united fronts at different levels capable of breaking the passivity imposed by trade union and student bureaucracies. The task isn’t simply to “struggle together” but also to build permanent institutions that can coordinate the struggle and bypass bureaucratic control.

ISJ: Is the goal here to launch a new workers’ organisation?

Matías: Rather than launching a new organisation, we are opening a strategic debate: the need to build a movement for a major party of the new working class—a class that has undergone enormous changes in recent decades, which includes broad sectors that have been made precarious by the neoliberal offensive and in which women play a much greater role, a class that is more diverse than before. The task is to create the conditions for a political force on a different scale, grouping together tens of thousands of workers, students, young people, women and intellectuals behind a programme of class independence, while striving to enter a dialogue with and give a lead to millions. Our position is that the FIT-U, as a coalition of organisations that carries out agitation and propaganda around a programme of class struggle and socialism, has been and remains very positive, but is insufficient. The struggle is for a working-class party capable of surpassing Peronism, the bourgeois nationalist current that has historically dominated the Argentine working class.

When we speak of a working-class party, we mean a party that reflects the historical interests of the working class, not one that claims to represent the entire class sociologically—that would be a complete fiction. As Leon Trotsky argued, classes are heterogeneous and made up of different layers, some looking forward and others looking backward. This is why for us discussion around the programme and strategy that such a party would adopt is crucial. We are proposing that the FIT-U programme is the starting point for this debate. Within this movement for a party of the new working class, we are fighting to ensure that the party that emerges is a party of the vanguard of the working class, one that seeks to influence the working class as a whole as it exists today, with all its different sectors, through bodies of self-organisation, through the struggle to reclaim the trade unions, by promoting united fronts and by fighting, ultimately, for institutions of workers’ democracy such as soviets. It would be a party that engages with, organises, influences and seeks to lead the majority.

ISJ: Two of the major global political problems of our era, similar to those of the interwar period, are the rise of the far right and the struggle against imperialism. Here in Britain, as in most European countries, we are engaged in battles against right-wing populist and fascist forces. And we all have to confront the genocide in Palestine, the wars waged by Trump and Netanyahu against Iran and Lebanon, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. How do these two global issues manifest themselves in Argentina?

Matías: They do so with their own peculiarities and are interconnected. Argentina remains subject to the dictates of the IMF. Milei’s government represents the most servile alignment with US imperialism and the State of Israel that Argentina has seen in decades. Only the left has denounced the genocide in Gaza. Moreover, in Latin America, we are witnessing attacks on Venezuela and attempts to re-colonise it. Trump is also continuing the siege and criminal blockade of Cuba. However, this offensive is taking place within the broader context of the hegemonic decline of US imperialism. In the imperialist war against Iran, the US and Israel are suffering a strategic defeat. This has important implications for the international situation and bears some similarities with the defeat in the Vietnam War: it can open up new possibilities for class struggle and for peoples to resist imperialist domination.

Anti-imperialism occupies a central place in our politics—not only for the PTS, but for our international tendency as a whole. It runs through the principal battles we are waging in both the imperialist countries and the semi-colonial and dependent countries where the CRP-CI has organisations. Today, the sharpest expression of the imperialist offensive in Latin America is in Bolivia. There is a workers’, peasants’ and popular rebellion against the government of Rodrigo Paz, in which our Bolivian sister organisation, the Revolutionary Workers League for the Fourth International (Liga Obrera Revolucionaria por la Cuarta Internacional, LOR-CI), is intervening. In Chile, amid the rapid erosion of support for the far-right president, José Antonio Kast, the student movement—historically a major actor in Chilean politics—is once again becoming active, and our comrades in the Revolutionary Workers Party (Partido de Trabajadores Revolucionarios, PTR) are an organic part of it.

Meanwhile, in Brazil, our comrades in the Revolutionary Workers Movement (Movimento Revolucionário de Trabalhadores, MRT) are waging an important political struggle against sectors of the left that line up behind the president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in the name of building an “anti-right-wing front”, even while Lula supports Paz’s government in Bolivia. The struggle against the genocide in Palestine and for a free Palestine—from the river to the sea—is another central issue for us. Because of this activity, comrades such as Anasse Kazib, the main spokesperson of our sister organisation in France, Révolution Permanente (Permanent Revolution), have faced prosecution. These struggles—as well as the fight for the defeat of imperialism in Iran and against imperialist militarism more generally—are central to our perspective. This is also reflected in our proposal to build a movement for an international of socialist revolution—which, for us, means the Fourth International—bringing together other sectors and organisations.

ISJ: The International Socialist Tendency, with which this journal is associated, tends to emphasise Trotsky’s united front tactic to fight racism and fascism or to mobilise against war. For instance, the British Socialist Workers Party has had a long history based on this approach, through the Anti Nazi League in the 1970s, the Stop the War Coalition since the early 2000s in response to the war on terror and through Stand Up to Racism, which was the engine of the mass mobilisation of 500,000 people against racism in London on 28 March 2026. Has this tactic been important in the development of the PTS?

Matías: The struggle for the united front is crucial in our practice. Theoretically, the united front has also been a central preoccupation for our tendency, one to which we have dedicated years of study, discussion and elaboration. Some of these debates were brought together in the book Estrategia socialista y arte militar (Socialist Strategy and the Military Art), which I wrote with Emilio Albamonte, where we took up the critical appropriation that Frederick Engels, Franz Mehring, Lenin, Trotsky and other revolutionaries made of Carl Clausewitz, Hans Delbrück and other classical military theoreticians in order to think through problems of revolutionary strategy and tactics. This is an aspect of Marxism that was notably neglected for years.11

In conceptualising the united front, our starting point is the formulations of the third and fourth Congresses of the Communist International, and those later developed by Gramsci and Trotsky. In societies with more complex socio-political structures, broadly generalised today, the tactic of the united front, “march together, strike separately”, is the prerequisite for millions of workers to have, alongside the revolutionaries, a common practice and experience of the limitations of their reformist leaderships. For Lenin and Trotsky, as for us, the united front has a precise class content: as a “workers’ united front”, formed between working-class organisations. In this regard, we distinguish it from the more general unity in action that can involve other class sectors in alliance with the proletariat. Another key point is that it is a tactic subordinated to an overall revolutionary strategy, to win over a majority of the working class to the struggle for power. Without this perspective, “unity” becomes an end in itself, and the united front can turn into its opposite: the popular front, that is, the subordination of the workers’ movement, directly or indirectly, to the interests of a sector of the ruling class against another.

Now, struggling for a united front with mass organisations can turn into an abstract discussion if we don’t recognise that, in order to impose it, sufficient forces are required. In the context of a fragmented working-class movement, and of weak revolutionary left-wing forces, other tactics that are complementary to the united front, such as the “action committees” articulated by Trotsky in his writings on France, take on a great importance. In those writings, Trotsky outlines an original conception of the construction of the vanguard sectors from the creation of bodies of unity and coordination. This in turn can be a route to strengthening the influence of the revolutionary left. Alongside the fight to take back the trade unions, the notion of “workers’ committees” is central today to impose the united front on the mass organisations. These are issues of major relevance and for us they have huge practical implications for the struggles that we are waging.

Matías Maiello is the co-author, alongside Emilio Albamonte, of Socialist Strategy and Military Art (Ediciones IPS, 2017) and the author of Leon Trotsky and Carl Schmitt: A Counterpoint on the Crisis of Democracy, Fascism and Revolution (Ediciones IPS, 2025)

Notes