Was Peronism a right-wing or left-wing movement?

I wasted about a year of my university studies in political science decades ago trying to answer this question and gave up. The answer is both and neither, which requires some explanation.

I need to explain first that an “ism” in Argentina does not mean a system of ideas even remotely akin to an ideology. Rather, it means a movement that follows a particular leader. Nineteenth century dictator and strongman Juan Manuel de Rosas, who is still controversial in Argentina, still has a following that calls itself “Rosista,” even though Rosas did not serve up an ideology but a set of gut-level slogans.

Peronism was, therefore, not about a set of ideas or an agenda, but about following a very charismatic man who invariably told his audience whatever he thought they wanted to hear.

In 1946, during his first campaign for the presidency in the historically cleanest election until that point, he told the chamber of commerce that he wanted unions in his movement so he could keep them from Communism. Much earlier, as military student in Italy when Mussolini took power, he expressed admiration for the man’s ability to mobilize thousands in the famous March on Rome.

At the same time, in order to win the support of the dispossessed majority of his people, he had to offer them something, indeed many things, that to a superficial observer look “socialist.” Peron rose from an obscure colonel who participated in a coup d’etat in 1943 thanks to his choice, when positions were being handed out to the conspiring officers, of an obscure office in the bowels of government known as the Secretariat of Labor. It was a minor position, albeit in an independent agency, but one that was not a cabinet-level ministry.

He used this position to introduce labor advances that were common elsewhere in the Western world: a whole rafter of safety and health measures for workers (including things as simple as requiring that pregnant industrial workers be allowed to work sitting on a stool rather than standing up). This is what won him, and later the various incarnations of his political parties, the undying support of unions and, more importantly, the bulk of the working class, the majority of voters. Every Peronist today has a grandparent who remembers Peron improving his lot at work or Evita bringing a Christmas basket to the poor neighborhood.

Peron also built up a huge public sector of utilities, railroads, transportation, energy and enterprises in other sectors, all of which also served as great places to give jobs to loyal Peronists.

The movement he left behind is a coalition of forces that bands together — or not — simply because, at least from 1946 to 2015, the Peronist party (which went through many names, from Laborist to Justicialist to Front for Victory) always won in open, free elections in which they fielded a candidate in earnest. There were elections in which Peronists were not allowed to field candidates and the “white,” or unmarked, ballot cast by Peronist voters “won.”

In 1973, Peron briefly welcomed the Montoneros, a left-wing urban guerrilla group of youths then inspired by Che Guevara, an Argentine, into his movement. All the while, he was dealing with the unions, which are more centrist, and his own former military colleagues, who were always dead to the right. Thus, he left behind a movement that tries to be everything to everybody, just as he was.

After Peron (and a brutal 1976–83 military dictatorship), Carlos Saúl Menem, a Peronist elected in 1989, ran his government under economic policies borrowed from Milton Friedman and dismantled the vast public holdings Peron had built up, privatizing nearly everything (even public parks!) and using the enormous bounty to sustain the fiction of parity of the peso to the U.S. dollar. By any measure, Menem is and was well right of center in his economic policy, even though he mouthed all the pretty populist words of Peron.

A Peronist successor, the late Nestor Kirchner, was elected in 2003 to clean up the inevitable mess that Menem’s smoke-and-mirror policies (a game that I admit I could not figure out at the time) brought on in 2001. When Argentines talk about 2001 with horror written all over their faces, they are not referring to September 11; instead, they mean December of that year, when their currency lost 75% of its value overnight and the country defaulted on its considerable foreign debt (most of which had been accumulated by military dictatorships). Kirchner campaigned to bring down 9% unemployment (in a country that historically had a surfeit of jobs and a lack of workers) and massive impoverishment. Kirchner and his wife, who succeeded him and was reelected, disowned the debt, put fierce controls on currency exchange to avoid having to pay usurious debt rates, and moderately rebuilt and expanded Peron’s welfare state, while bringing down unemployment and getting the country on an even keel with relatively mild Keynesian policies.

Both Menem and Kirchner, whose policies are polar opposites (respectively, right- and left-of-center) claimed the mantle of Peronism. What they meant was that they were willing to mumble the requisite pieties of the movement to do whatever they had in mind in the first place.

That, in sum, is Peronism. Both left and right, but also neither.