Never — But Never — Count Peronism Out

In Argentina there is a national sport: announcing that Peronism is dead. It’s been declared deceased in the 1950s, the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s — and yet again today. It always unfolds the same way: trumpets blare, obituaries are drafted, and pundits jubilate at the demise of the movement that has outlasted every eulogy written for it. And now the funeral noise has returned.

Let’s be frank: the Peronism we see onstage now looks devastated. Exhausted kirchnerism; Cristina Fernández de Kirchner trapped in her own historical mockery; Máximo uttering embarrassingly tone-deaf statements as if inheriting a nation that barely listens; Sergio Massa still licking the wounds of the night he wept believing he was president; and Axel Kicillof struggling to stretch his influence beyond the “kilometre zero” of La Plata.

Yes — that Peronism feels spent. No renewal, no narrative. Its visible structures look like the crumbling remains of a building propped up by scaffolding. But that is not the Peronism that truly defines power in Argentina. That fragile edifice is mere décor — props in a play whose script keeps changing.

The real Peronism — the one that breathes, survives, and mutates — resides elsewhere. It isn’t in Congress, political rallies, or social media. It’s underground, hooked up to a respirator no one wants to discuss publicly. A respirator corroded by decades of entrenched influence: the Argentine labour movement and its unions. There lies the unbreakable DNA of a movement that refuses extinction.

A group of scientists recently recovered DNA from a long-extinct mammoth, proving that extinction can be reversed if the genetic code survives. The same logic applies to Peronism. Today it may seem frozen, buried, or extinguished — but its DNA is intact, safeguarded in the deep vault of union power. As long as that DNA exists, the Peronist mammoth can stand again.

Visible leaders may be burned out, exhausted, or irrelevant. Cristina may play supporting roles in her own drama; Massa might contrive eternal optimism despite his paltry strategies; Kicillof might administer his province as though politics were an elective course. None of that truly matters.

Because none of them control the engine that always fuels a comeback: the union apparatus. And that apparatus — by many measures a corporate behemoth — endures. Its principals often hold power for two or three decades, an unparalleled longevity in any Western democracy. That creates not just a political party, but a corporation capable of withstanding crises, regime changes, and electoral defeats.

When President Fernando de la Rúa fell in 2001, it wasn’t a brilliant opposition that toppled him — it was a coordinated surge from governors and, above all, union leaders. That night revealed the real power behind Argentina’s democratic machinery. And today, those same actors remain, intact and poised for history to call on them once more.

So whoever thinks Peronism is dead because Cristina disappeared from the limelight, because Máximo is ineffective, because Massa is politically diminished, or because Kicillof lacks strategic depth is profoundly mistaken. The most visible failures are not the movement’s core; they are its scenery. The real engine, cranking away in the shadows, is the union network that has resisted everything else.

That is why — no matter how deep its coma, no matter how dim its public profile — Peronism should never be pronounced dead. While the syndical structure continues to breathe — even if only in a political intensive-care unit — the mammoth can open its eyes again. And when that beast rises, history shows us what happens next: it tramples everything in its path, as it always has.