“This is the most important election in the last 100 years,” Milei declared this week, urging voters to evict the “delinquent” Peronist politicians who have governed Argentina for 16 of the last 20 years “and have ruined our lives”. Milei has dialled down his inflammatory rhetoric in the weeks since October’s vote, hoping to seduce voters put off by his radical ideas, which include closing more than a dozen ministries, cutting ties with Argentina’s two biggest trade partners, Brazil and China, and condemning the pope as “a lefty son of a bitch”. But since then Milei – a climate-denying provocateur often compared to the far-right populists Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro – has been endorsed by several influential conservatives, including former president Mauricio Macri and the third-place candidate, Patricia Bullrich, who had previously condemned Milei’s “bad and dangerous” proposals. Massa, a centrist member of Alberto Fernández’s incumbent Peronist administration, unexpectedly won last month’s first round, with 9.8m votes to Milei’s 8m.

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