Justicialist Party
The Justicialist Party, also known as the Peronist Party, is a major political party in Argentina, and the largest branch within Peronism.
Founded by Juan Perón and his wife, First Lady Eva Perón, the party followed a left-wing agenda based on his policies. It is overall the largest party in Congress. Historically, the party's factual position was undermined by divisions that emerged in the 1990s and lasted until 2020; the PJ was rocked by a conflict between two Peronist tendencies, Kirchnerism, the main, left-wing populist faction, and Federal Peronism, which was located on the centre and centre-right of the political spectrum. The division ended with the failure of Federal Peronism to challenge the dominating Kirchnerist faction in 2019. This was completed by Cristina Kirchner, the leader of Kirchnerism, being elected the leader of the party, and the creation of a separate dissident party — the Federal Consensus. Today, the party adheres to an ideology based on economic intervention, welfare-state policies, and economic independence from wealthier countries; it is located on the centre-left and left wing of the political spectrum.
Aside from Juan Perón, who governed Argentina on three occasions from 1946 to 1955 and later from 1973 to 1974, eleven presidents of Argentina have belonged to the Justicialist Party: Héctor Cámpora, Raúl Alberto Lastiri, Isabel Perón, Carlos Menem, Ramón Puerta, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, Eduardo Camaño, Eduardo Duhalde, Néstor Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Alberto Fernández. Justicialists have been the largest party in Congress almost consistently since 1987.
History
Overview
The Justicialist Party was founded in 1946 by Juan and Eva Perón, uniting the Labour Party, the Radical Civic Union Renewal Board and the Independent Party, the three parties that had supported Peron in the election. After the enactment of women's suffrage, the Female Peronist Party, led by the First Lady, was also established. All Peronist entities were banned from elections after 1955, when the Revolución Libertadora overthrew Perón, and civilian governments' attempt to lift Peronism's ban from legislative and local elections in 1962 and 1965 resulted in military coups.Basing itself on the policies espoused by Perón as Argentine president, the party's platform has, from its inception, centered on populism, and its most consistent base of support has historically been the General Confederation of Labor, Argentina's largest trade union. Perón ordered the mass nationalization of public services, strategic industries, and the critical farm export sector; enacted progressive labor laws and social reforms; and accelerated public works investment.
His tenure also favored technical schools, harassed university staff, and promoted urbanization as it raised taxes on the agrarian sector. Those trends earned Peronism the loyalty of much of the working and lower classes but helped alienate the upper and middle classes of society. Censorship and repression intensified, and following his loss of support from the influential Argentine Catholic Church, Perón was ultimately deposed in a violent 1955 coup.
The alignment of groups as supporting or opposing Peronism has largely endured, but the policies of Peronism itself varied greatly over the subsequent decades, as did increasingly those put forth by its many competing figures. During Perón's exile, it became a big tent party united almost solely by its support for the aging leader's return. A series of violent incidents, as well as Perón's negotiations with both the military regime and diverse political factions, helped lead to his return to Argentina in 1973 and to his election in September that year.
An impasse followed in which the party had a place both for leftist armed organizations such as Montoneros, and far-right factions such as José López Rega's Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. Following Perón's death in 1974, however, the tenuous understanding disintegrated, and a wave of political violence ensued, ultimately resulting in the March 1976 coup. The Dirty War of the late 1970s, which cost hundreds of Peronists their lives, solidified the party's populist outlook, particularly following the failure of conservative Economy Minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz's free trade and deregulatory policies after 1980.
In the first democratic elections after the end of the dictatorship of the National Reorganization Process, in 1983, the Justicialist Party lost to the Radical Civic Union. Six years later, it returned to power with Carlos Menem, during whose term the Constitution was reformed to allow for presidential reelection. Menem adopted neoliberal right-wing policies which changed the overall image of the party.
The Justicialist Party was defeated by a coalition formed by the UCR and the centre-left FrePaSo in 1999, but regained political weight in the 2001 legislative elections, and was ultimately left in charge of managing the selection of an interim president after the economic collapse of December 2001. Justicialist Eduardo Duhalde, chosen by Congress, ruled during 2002 and part of 2003.
The 2003 elections saw the constituency of the party split in three, as Carlos Menem, Néstor Kirchner and Adolfo Rodríguez Saá ran for the presidency leading different party coalitions. After Kirchner's victory, the party started to align behind his leadership, moving slightly to the left.
The Justicialist Party effectively broke apart in the 2005 legislative elections when two factions ran for a Senate seat in Buenos Aires Province: Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Hilda González de Duhalde. The campaign was particularly vicious. Kirchner's side allied with other minor forces and presented itself as a heterodox, left-leaning Front for Victory, while Duhalde's side stuck to older Peronist tradition. González de Duhalde's defeat to her opponent marked, according to many political analysts, the end to Duhalde's dominance over the province, and was followed by a steady defection of his supporters to the winner's side.
Néstor Kirchner proposed the entry of the party into the Socialist International in February 2008. His dominance of the party was undermined, however, by the 2008 Argentine government conflict with the agricultural sector, when a bill raising export taxes was introduced with presidential support. Subsequent growers' lockouts helped result in the defection of numerous Peronists from the FpV caucus, and further losses during the 2009 mid-term elections resulted in the loss of the FpV absolute majorities in both houses of Congress.
In 2015, the PJ, with its presidential candidate Daniel Scioli, was defeated by the Cambiemos coalition. Mauricio Macri was inaugurated as President of Argentina, ending 12 years of Kirchnerism.
However, in the elections of 2019, the PJ joined the Frente de Todos, which won the presidential elections. The PJ returned to power, with Alberto Fernández as President of the nation. On 10 December 2019, the Centre-left Alberto Fernández of the Justicialist Party was inaugurated president, after defeating the incumbent Mauricio Macri in the 2019 Argentine general election.
The success of the party in the 2019 elections was juxtaposed with the failure of dissident Federal Peronists to challenge the Kirchnerist majority within the party. The Federal Peronists failed to distinguish themselves from anti-Peronist movements, and their bid to put up its own electoral lists to compete with Kirchnerists failed. The election resulted in a "dismantling of the Federal Peronism alternative".
On 22 March 2021, Fernández was elected by the national congress of the Justicialist Party as the party's new national chairman, succeeding José Luis Gioja. Fernández ran unopposed, heading the Unidad y Federalismo list, which received the support of diverse sectors in the Peronist movement, including La Cámpora.
The Union for the Homeland is a centre-left to left-wing political and electoral coalition of Peronist political parties in Argentina, formed to compete in the 2023 general election. The coalition is a successor to the previous Frente de Todos coalition. The coalition is centered on the Justicialist Party and its allies both on the federal and provincial levels, including the Renewal Front of Sergio Massa.
In April 2023, President Alberto Fernandez announced that he would not seek re-election in the next presidential election. In the primary elections on August of that year, Sergio Massa defeated Juan Grabois by a margin of nearly 16 percentage points, although it became the worst result for a ruling Peronist coalition since the PASO was first implemented in 2009.
In the runoff in November 2023, Libertarian candidate Javier Milei defeated Massa with 55.7% against 44.35% of the vote, the highest percentage of the vote since Argentina's transition to democracy. Massa conceded defeat shortly before the official results were published.
Beginning
The Justicialist party was created in November 1946, 10 months after Juan D. Perón was elected president of the nation, with the name Single Revolutionary party; previously this would be called the Peronist party. The party was a result of the fusion of three parties that had been created in 1945 in order to sustain the presidential candidacy of Perón: the Labor party, the Radical Renovating Together Civic Union, and the Independent party.Peronism
Peronism is a political current that was established between November 1943 and October 1945, as a result of an alliance between a large number of unions, principally of socialist and revolutionary union ideology, and two soldiers – Juan Domingo Perón and Domingo Mercante, whose initial objective was to run the National Labor Department – later elevated to the level of Secretary of Labor and Social Security – and to drive until there were laws and measures for the worker's benefit. The Secretary was run by Perón, who in the course of those years was converted into the leader of a new political movement that would take the name Peronism in the course of 1945.Since 1943, the country was governed by a military dictatorship self-designated as the Revolution of ‘43, made of a very heterogeneous composition, that had overthrown at its time a fraudulent regime, known as the Infamous Decade. At the start of 1945, the US ambassador to Argentina, Spruille Braden, organized a broad movement that was defined as anti-peronist, with the goal of opposing Perón and the sanctioned labor laws. Largely as a reaction to the union movement, principally the socialist and revolutionary union majority started to define themselves as peronists.
On 8 October 1945, at the loss of the vote from the officials of Campo de Mayo, Perón renounced, being later detained. Nine days later, a big worker mobilization known as Loyalty Day, compelled the military government to prepare Perón's liberation and call elections. That day is the most cited as the date of peronism's birth.