In a particularly explosive set of comments, former President Mauricio Macri opened fire against the current administration and predicted that his coalition, Juntos por el Cambio (JxC), will end up competing in a second round in this year’s elections against far-right libertarian economist Javier Milei.

“We are going to go to a second round with this new, more liberal, more disruptive and angry expression. It will be a challenge for the candidate who wins the internal election,” Macri said at the Inter-American Council for Trade and Production (CICyP in Spanish) at La Rural.

He said that his party has the same “disruptive attitude and intentions for change” as those of Milei, who leads the far-right coalition La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances), “but with experience.”

“Increasingly more people are getting angry and believe that we have to blow up everything,” he said, using markedly increased combative rhetoric. “I believe that we have to blow up almost everything.”

“We have lost dialogue because these people [the national government] have destroyed the value of the word, we have always worshipped dialogue”, said Macri. 

When speaking about the changes that the next government will have to make, he said that it will be necessary to “stand up” against “the crazed orc army that wants to keep their cheese,” referring to the current administration in more extreme terms than usual. 

Macri said this two days after Buenos Aires Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, from the moderate wing of his party, announced that national and city elections will be held on the same days this year, but with separate ballots.

The prospect of dividing the ballot for national and city elections put Larreta at odds with PRO party-mate Macri, who tweeted that it was “a profound disappointment” following the announcement. 

Today, Macri said that Larreta “was wrong” in making that decision.

“I questioned that he did not work as a team with the other candidates [of his party, PRO, Patricia Bullrich and María Eugenia Vidal], and that he made a mistake, especially in not sitting down with the two of them.”

“We are the change or we are nothing. We are facing the end of populism,” he added.

“We are definitely looking at the disappearance of Peronism-Kirchnerism in its current iteration.”