Will the Peronists resort to God in 2027?

Domestic politics is becoming increasingly religious. This week, President Javier Milei lost his head-of-state posture when he stood in front of the Western Wall in Jerusalem; while in Buenos Aires, a Catholic mass in Luján to mark the first anniversary of the death of Pope Francis gathered ruling party and opposition leaders, something very out of character in Argentina.

Politics here has always had a dose of faith and paganism; Evita Perón was a saint to many (the devil to others), but now some people believe that the country’s next leader could be explicitly religious. Enter Dante Gebel.

The natural course of events would lead to a presidential race next year pitting two economists with diametrically opposed intellectual upbringings: Milei and his Hayek-inspired libertarianism versus the Keynesian latecomer to Peronism, Axel Kicillof, the current governor of Buenos Aires Province. But Gebel, an Argentine pastor who built a communications-driven Church empire in North America, is testing the waters to see if he can break this dichotomy and appeal to Argentine voters from a spiritual rather than a rational angle.

Gebel comes from a working-class family in Billinghurst, in the western section of the Buenos Aires suburbs. He can claim to be a self-made man, having succeeded in amassing large crowds and a large social media following with his spiritual and optimistic message. He claims to be on the autism spectrum, with Asperger’s, which he describes as God’s blessing to him. 

So far, we only know that Gebel has a few friends in Argentine politics who want him to run for president, even as the Peronist candidate. The California-based evangelical pastor is sending mixed messages about his own intentions, hinting that he will only make a decision after the 2026 World Cup.

The Gebel question is at the heart of a larger issue: how the Peronists sort out their leadership dilemma in order to be competitive in next year’s presidential race. All polls show a decline in President Milei’s approval ratings, mostly on the back of an economy that grows in capital-intensive, export-driven sectors like farming, energy, and mining, but falls in labour-intensive, domestic market-oriented sectors like SME (PyMEs), manufacturing and construction. If this trend continues – or even stays as it is now – the 2027 election will be competitive. A reminder: none of Argentina’s last two presidents managed to be re-elected.

In that scenario, the opposition’s offering gains relevance. But a united opposition is not the same as a divided opposition. The way the opposition anoints its candidate is important too. Today, about a year out from the start of the next presidential campaign, the Peronists are toying with four courses of action.

The first is good old Forced Unity, which means picking a candidate reluctantly accepted by the majority but without an ample consensus. This is what the Peronists did in the last three presidential votes, losing two of them (2015 and 2023). The obvious candidate for this would be Kicillof, but he would face pushback from the right and the left of the party and would likely find it hard to govern – like Alberto Fernández – if he won.

The second is to go to a primary. The Milei administration is hoping to make this difficult by trying to eliminate the obligatory PASO primaries altogether. But with or without a general primary, an internal election would allow the Peronists to field as many candidates as necessary and to emerge with a new leadership that is validated through votes. The last time something like this happened, however, was as long ago as 1988, when Carlos Menem beat the then-governor of Buenos Aires Province, Antonio Cafiero.

The third alternative is running several candidates in the general election. This could be an option if the PASO primaries are scrapped and there is no agreement on the terms of an internal election and/or if the Milei administration reaches the electoral season in very bad shape – which would increase incentives for anybody to fight for the big prize. This is what the Peronists did in 2003, when they fielded three presidential candidates who were not even on speaking terms: Carlos Menem, Néstor Kirchner, and Adolfo Rodríguez Saá.

The fourth way for the Peronists is to look for their own version of Milei: an outsider. This is where somebody like Gebel could enter the scene, or an establishment figure with little general public awareness, perhaps banker Jorge Brito, the former chair of River Plate football club. That would be a new outsider versus an established outsider (Milei). 

There is little precedent of an outsider beating an outsider in Latin America in recent years. Betting on Gebel would be asking for a true miracle.