Argentine politics: a federal constitution governed from the presidency

How the constitution divides power

The constitution in force is the one adopted in 1853, reformed several times since and most recently in 1994. It defines a federal, presidential and representative republic in which the president is both head of state and head of government. Legislative power belongs to a two-chamber National Congress, and a Supreme Court heads the judiciary.

The federal design is real on paper. Argentina is divided into 23 provinces and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and every province has its own constitution, governor and legislature. Fifteen of the 24 have one-chamber legislatures and nine have two. The 1994 text gives the provinces the original ownership of the natural resources in their territory.

Money runs the other way. The main national taxes are collected centrally and shared with the provinces under a system the constitution calls co-participation, which it requires to guarantee the automatic transfer of funds. A transitional clause of the 1994 reform required a new co-participation law before the end of 1996. Freedom House describes the governors as powerful figures who tend to influence the national lawmakers from their provinces.

The constitution also takes a position on religion. The federal government supports the Roman Catholic faith, and Britannica notes that the Church receives financial support from the state without being an official religion. Freedom of worship is guaranteed, and public education is secular.

Why presidents govern by decree

The president and vice president serve four-year terms and may be re-elected once in a row, after which a full term must pass before either can stand again. A candidate wins in the first round with more than 45% of the valid vote, or with at least 40% and a lead of more than ten points over the runner-up; otherwise the top two go to a runoff, which decided the elections of 2015 and 2023.

The office has long been stronger than its written powers. Carlos Menem used decrees of necessity and urgency freely in the 1990s whenever Congress could not agree on his reforms. The 1994 reform, agreed between Menem and the Radical leader Raúl Alfonsín in the Olivos Pact, did two things at once. It allowed a president a second consecutive term, which is what Menem wanted. It also gave the decree a constitutional basis and hedged it: a president may issue one only when exceptional circumstances make the ordinary law-making process impossible, never on criminal, tax or electoral matters or on political parties, and only with the signatures of all the ministers and the Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, who must put the decree before a standing committee of both chambers within ten days.

The Chief of Cabinet was the reform's other check, an office first filled on 8 July 1995. The holder has political responsibility to Congress, and the constitution requires an appearance before the two chambers in turn at least once a month to report on the government's progress. Freedom House recorded in 2025 that the monthly report rarely happens in practice.

The decree has kept its place. In December 2023 an incoming government signed a single decree of more than 300 provisions modifying or revoking laws, parts of which were challenged in court. In June 2024 Congress passed a broad reform law delegating to the president the power to legislate on administrative, economic, financial and energy matters for a year. With no budget approved for 2024, the government extended the 2023 budget and reallocated funds by decree.

How Congress is elected and renewed

The two chambers are elected on different principles, and each is renewed in part every two years.

The Senate's formula guarantees the second party in every province a seat, so no province is represented by a single party in the upper house, and the vice president of the nation presides over it. Because half the Chamber of Deputies is renewed every two years, a government can lose Congress midway through its term, as in November 2021, when the governing coalition lost its majority for the first time in almost forty years.

Voting is compulsory from 18 to 70 and optional at 16 and 17, a right extended in 2012, and for those over 70. Primary elections are compulsory for parties too: only lists that win 1.5% of the national vote in the open primaries go on to the general election, and in 2023 five of the 27 presidential primary candidates passed that bar. A law of 2017 requires party lists for Congress to alternate men and women, and after the 2023 elections women held just over 40% of the seats in both chambers. In October 2024 Congress replaced the old system of party-printed ballots with a single paper ballot for national elections.

There are 16,508 elected posts in all: the president and vice president, the 329 members of Congress, 48 governors and deputy governors, 1,122 mayors and thousands of provincial and municipal legislators.

Which parties have shaped Argentine politics

Two old parties have organised most of the country's politics. The Radical Civic Union, founded in 1891, grew from the middle-class opposition to the landowning governments of the late 19th century and won the first presidential election under secret male suffrage in 1916. The Justicialist Party grew out of Juan Perón's movement of the 1940s and its base in the unions. Britannica records that the Peronists have held the government for most of the time since civilian rule returned in 1983. Traditionally the Radicals drew on the urban middle class and the Peronists on labour, and both have since become broader.

Neither has been stable. Peronism has been nationalist and pro-labour under Perón, market-liberal under Menem in the 1990s and centre-left under the Kirchners after 2003, and it has split repeatedly into rival fronts. The Radicals formed the Alianza with the centre-left FrePaSo to win in 1999, and the party lost much of its support after De la Rúa resigned in December 2001. Parties born since, such as Republican Proposal, founded as a centre-right coalition around the city of Buenos Aires in the 2000s, have governed in alliance with the Radicals.

Provincial politics has its own logic. Provincial parties multiplied after 1983 and won several governorships, and both they and the provincial branches of the two national parties have often been run by family dynasties, the Sapag family in Neuquén and the Rodríguez Saá family in San Luis among them. Freedom House notes that clientelism and voter intimidation still shape choices in poorer regions.

Three presidential elections in a row, in 2015, 2019 and 2023, were won by a challenger against the governing party, a pattern Freedom House notes. The runoff of November 2023 was won with close to 56% of the vote by a candidate who had entered politics two years earlier and had no national party structure behind him.

How the courts deal with the dictatorship

The Supreme Court has five members, appointed by the president with the approval of the Senate and removable by Congress. Judges who reach 75 need a fresh appointment, with the same Senate consent, to stay in office, and appointments after that age run for five years. Freedom House described the Supreme Court in 2025 as relatively independent and willing to resist executive overreach, and lower and provincial courts as closely tied to political actors. Two of the five seats were vacant at the end of 2024, and the national ombudsman's post had been empty for fifteen years. Only the Chamber of Deputies can bring charges against a justice, a minister or the president before the Senate; in 2023 deputies of the Peronist coalition then in government approved impeachment proceedings against the whole Supreme Court in committee, and the motion lapsed at the end of 2024.

The courts also carry the prosecution of the crimes of 1976 to 1983. The juntas were tried in 1985. An amnesty law of December 1986 and Menem's pardons then closed most cases, and the Supreme Court declared the amnesty laws unconstitutional in 2005. Freedom House counted more than 1,221 convictions for crimes of the dictatorship between 2006 and September 2024, and describes the civic organisations that grew up around those abuses, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo among them, as playing a major role in society.

The ordinary justice system is weaker. Pretrial detainees made up 43.6% of the prison population in June 2024, and prisons are overcrowded. Corruption prosecutions of senior politicians and businessmen have been marked by long delays, appeals and dismissals.

Where Argentina stands on the Falklands

The dispute over the Falkland Islands is written into the constitution. A transitional clause of the 1994 reform ratifies what it calls Argentina's legitimate and everlasting sovereignty over the Malvinas, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and their maritime areas, and makes their recovery, respecting the lifestyle of their inhabitants and in conformity with international law, a permanent and unwaivable objective.

The two positions have not moved. Argentina bases its claim on succession to Spanish sovereignty at independence and on the removal of its authorities by a British naval force in January 1833; it holds that the islanders, brought in under British rule, have no right of self-determination recognised by the United Nations, and argues from territorial integrity. The United Kingdom dates its claim to a first recorded landing in 1690, has administered the islands almost continuously since 1833, and treats the islanders' right of self-determination as the deciding principle. In a referendum in March 2013 the islanders voted nearly unanimously to remain a British overseas territory.

The United Nations has asked both sides since 1965 to negotiate a peaceful settlement. Argentina and the United Kingdom restored full diplomatic relations in October 1989 while setting the sovereignty question aside, and commercial flights between the islands and the mainland resumed in 1999. This catalogue records both claims and takes no position on them.

Argentina also claims a sector of Antarctica, which overlaps the claims of Chile and the United Kingdom. All three are frozen under the Antarctic Treaty of 1961, of which Argentina is a founding signatory, and the treaty's secretariat sits in Buenos Aires.

Who Argentina stands with abroad

Argentina is a founding member of the United Nations, the Organization of American States and the World Trade Organization, and of the Mercosur trade bloc with Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. It belongs to the G20 and the Group of 77, and the United States designates it a major non-NATO ally. Argentina had been set to join the BRICS group on 1 January 2024 and announced that it would not.

The armed forces are under civilian control and are much smaller than they were. Britannica puts active personnel at about 70,000, three fifths of them in the army, and annual military spending at a small fraction of output. Conscription ended after the murder of a conscript, Omar Carrasco, caused a public scandal in the 1990s. Argentine troops have served in United Nations missions in Cyprus, in Iraq and Kuwait and in the former Yugoslavia.