Focusing squarely on attacks against Kirchnerism, President Javier Milei on Thursday unveiled his La Libertad Avanza (LLA) party’s candidates for the Buenos Aires provincial elections scheduled for September 7. They are the “ones in charge of putting a stop to Kicillof and damned Kirchnerism,” he declared to supporters who packed the Atenas Stadium in the provincial capital of La Plata.

The President entered the rally through the crowd, greeted by chants of “freedom” and waves of LLA’s purple flags. Taking the stage, he hailed the audience as “free lions ready to devour Kirchnerism at the polls.” He hammered that message repeatedly, portraying the province as a “no man’s land” and a “stronghold of backwardness, corruption, and planned human misery.”

He began by thanking Sebastián Pareja, LLA’s political organizer in the province, and “El Jefe” (The Boss) — his sister Karina, General Secretary of the Presidency, head of the party at the national level, and overseer of all electoral operations. Milei then introduced the top candidates from the eight electoral districts, calling them “those tasked with putting a brake on Kicillof and damned Kirchnerism.”

Describing the state of Buenos Aires province, Milei reeled off negative statistics about schools and students’ performance in language and math, without giving sources. He claimed hospitals lacked refrigerators and that doctors earned less than in other districts.

He rounded out this bleak portrayal with security concerns, one of his campaign pillars. “With this decay and neglect, we’ve ended up with a province bathed in blood,” he said. He claimed the homicide rate in La Matanza was six times that of Rosario and lobbed one of his sharper lines: “Kirchnerism is worse than the drug trafficker.”

La Matanza is a department of the province that lies along the western border of Buenos Aires City. With a population of 1.8 million, it is a key electoral battleground. The port city of Rosario has experienced a wave of homicides linked with organized crime in recent years, but the bloodshed has since slowed. 

Fact checking site Chequeado points out that the homicide rate in Buenos Aires Province as a whole was 4.3 per 100,000 in 2024, according to figures from the Security Ministry — the second-lowest in 25 years. The rate was lower than the 4.6 per 100,000 rate recorded in Santa Fe province, where Rosario is located.

In his speech, Milei targeted Buenos Aires Governor Axel Kicillof, the leading figure in provincial Peronism, who decided to separate provincial elections from the national vote. He accused Kicillof of “turning his back on Buenos Aires residents again and again,” of “wasting money,” and of filling his government with “ñoquis” — slang for political appointees who collect a salary without working.

“But the problem is much deeper and older than Kicillof,” Milei said. “It’s about a bloated state that has built layer upon layer of useless bureaucrats and paid political activists.”

He then accused the opposition of treating the elections as a means of “staying in power to block the structural changes we are driving from the national level.”

The president urged voters to go to the ballot boxes. “Staying home is not an option,” he said, accusing Peronism of trying to depress participation.

“They want decent Buenos Aires citizens to stay home so only their ‘ñoquis’ go vote,” he said.

“The price of ignoring politics is to be governed by the worst men — and boy, are they the worst. We’ve spent too long looking the other way; now is the time to get involved and kick them out once and for all […] We have to vote as if it were an act of personal defense,” Milei concluded.

-Ámbito/Herald