Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof said today that the outcome of Sunday’s local elections are a result of president Milei’s “sinking” economic plan.

“Turns out that Milei wasn’t a libertarian liberal who was coming to take down the Central Bank. He came to implement an orthodox, conventional austerity plan that has been applied 20 times before with the same outcome,” he said in a Monday interview in Radio con Vos.

“This is the result of that,” he added.

The Peronist Fuerza Patria won in a landslide victory against President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza (LLA), with 47% of the vote against LLA’s 33%, according to preliminary results with over 99% of the votes counted.

Kicillof pointed to “a three-way crisis” in the national administration, listing the economic situation, the recent disability bribery scandal and the government’s latest financial maneuvering as key elements in Peronism’s surprising landslide victory.

The Buenos Aires governor said that the government’s decisionmakers made “interpretation mistakes” by strategizing the election “as if it was the World Cup finals”, encouraged by the results from the Buenos Aires City elections.

“What they failed to notice is that Milei brought nothing but damage down here. There is no region or sector that wasn’t hurt by Milei’s policies,” he added.

Kicillof described the local elections as an overall survey of both the national government and the province’s administration. He recalled that both him and more than 80 Peronist mayors of Buenos Aires districts had won their reelections by wide margins. “There has been very visible progress here, and I think people value that,” he said.

Milei accepted the “clear defeat” in a speech at the LLA headquarters on Sunday night, saying that self-criticism was necessary and that they would fix their mistakes — but stick to their political direction. Economy Minister Luis Caputo also promised there would be no changes on the economic front.

“If Milei is reading these results backwards, that worries me, as the representative of 17 million people,” said Kicillof.

“My hope is that yesterday’s results in the most populated province — which is the country’s biggest production hub, depends mostly on public education and has only public hospitals — prompt Milei to reconsider and change course. That would be a good answer,” he added.