The managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, said that the success of Argentina’s program depends on popular support.

“Argentina is taking a very dramatic adjustment program forward,” Georgieva said on Wednesday during the 2025 Annual Meetings at the Milken Institute in Washington, DC. “The success is going to be based on carrying people with you.”

Georgieva used Argentina as an example of the conditions for the success of austerity measures, highlighting the importance of getting people “to understand that a ballooning deficit and more public spending are not necessarily good for them.”

The other examples she used belonged to her “part of the world, in Central and Eastern Europe,” where, she said, “brave leaders” cut pensions and wages by 40% and 50% and were re-elected.

“We still haven’t figured out how to do that — how to bring people with us on things that are tough.”

The Milei administration signed a US$20 billion loan with the IMF in May, on top of the US$44 billion debt former President Mauricio Macri took with the lender in 2018. Georgieva told Reuters after the conference that the ongoing program is not the first one between the agency and the country — “but if I put my optimistic hat on, I can maybe say that it could be the last program of the IMF with Argentina,” adding that her “dream” is for “Argentina to be entirely on its own feet.”

“They have all the ingredients for prosperity. What they were lacking was on the policy front.”

The IMF boss made the remarks while an Argentine delegation, led by Economy Minister Luis Caputo, is negotiating the details of a recently-announced bailout with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in Washington. In late September, Bessent announced the loan, which could include the purchase of the country’s USD bonds, a stand-by credit line, and a US$20 billion swap with the Central Bank.

Georgieva told Reuters she expected news about the bailout soon.

President Javier Milei is set to meet his U.S. counterpart, Donald Trump, at the White House on October 14.

Meanwhile, Argentines are preparing to vote in the October 26 national midterms as the government is shaken by financial unrest and corruption scandals involving Milei’s close allies.

On Sunday, the party’s lead deputy candidate for Buenos Aires province, José Luis Espert, dropped out of the race after being forced to admit he received US$200,000 from an alleged drug trafficker. In addition to the Espert scandal, in August, a string of leaked audios suggested that the president’s sister and Presidency Secretary, Karina Milei, had taken bribes from pharmaceutical companies in exchange for state contracts.