The Red Shadow of Peronism: The Rise of Myriam Bregman (Part One)
El Sobrante
MAY 16, 2026
By Ezequiel Gil Lezama
As a result of different polls that, first, found in the surprising third position of positive image for Myriam Bregman, below Patricia Bullrich and Javier Milei but above Axel Kicillof, Victoria Villarruel and Cristina Kirchner, to then confirm that the Myriam phenomenon is growing, as reported in the Atlas Intel survey at the end of April.
There, Myriam Bregman appears first in a positive image with 47%, being the only leader with a positive differential (+1%, since she has a 46% negative image). The podium is completed by Axel Kicillof (46% positive) and Cristina Kirchner (41%), while in fourth place is Patricia Bullrich (37%) and in fifth place is Javier Milei (36% positive).
As we said, as a result of these numbers, a frenzy was unleashed on the left, in general, and in the PTS, in particular, which reached the fantasy that it can win the elections.
In this sense, we are going to deal with several aspects:
One, a brief review of Trotskyism in Argentina and the development of the PTS.
Two, how the PTS characterises Myriam’s growth and what she said about whether she would win the electoral contest.
Three, what was the reaction of the left, especially those who offered a program to govern?
Four, what the polls express and what Myriam Bregman represents. Let’s see.
Trotskyism in Argentina
Argentina is one of the few, very few, countries where Trotskyism exists. In fact, until a few years ago, it only existed in relevant terms in France and here (proving that in both places they are passionate about the abstract, given that psychoanalysis is still in force only in them).
In France, the historic Trotskyist party, perhaps the most important of all, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), renounced the insurrectionary path and, in an electoralist turn, was dissolved in 2009, giving birth to the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA), a sort of French Podemos or our FIT.
After some electoral performances far from expectations, it entered a deep crisis that, in 2022, led to a fracture: the NPA-A, more institutionalist and integrated into the Popular Front against Le Pen and the NPA-R, which maintains an independent line and seeks to bring together other like-minded parties, including the other historic Trotskyist party, Lutte Ouvrière (LO). more classical and workerist.
Then, we can mention a strong presence in Sri Lanka, a distant existence in Bolivia and nothing else. Obviously,y there are groups or parties in many more countries, but they have no weight.
We say, then, that Argentina is one of the few countries where Trotskyism exists and, not to mention, it must be the only one where it is hegemonic on the left, a place that took it half a century to occupy.
In fact, the first local Trotskyist group dates back to the end of the 1920s, when the Communist Opposition Committee was formed, after a split in the PCA, as a result of the Stalin-Trotsky dispute.
This group went on to edit a newspaper, La Verdad, and formed the Argentine section of the Fourth International.
The group was led by Antonio Gallo and Héctor Raurich, who carried out extensive intellectual activity and, not by chance, were the only Trotskyists to have a serious characterization of the country: Argentina, according to them, was an «intermediate» (not semi-colonial) country where the character of the revolution should be directly socialist, as long as there were no pending democratic tasks and they harshly criticized the policies of alliance with bourgeois sectors («anti-imperialist front» or «national») proposed by communists, socialists and nationalists (such as FORJA).
They maintained that the Argentine bourgeoisie had already fulfilled its revolutionary role and was now an obstacle; the struggle was to be against it, not in alliance. The slogan of «national liberation» as a separate stage was considered false or dangerous.
Delicate more to intellectual than political-practical tasks, the hegemony on the left, in that period, was occupied by the Communist Party.
However, despite an early existence in the country, it was only in the 1950s and 1960s that Trotskyism managed to have more influence on trade union activism thanks to the main figure that Trotskyism had in Argentina, Nahuel Moreno, founder of the Marxist Workers’ Group (GOM) in 1943 and «father» of most of the current parties (PTS, IS, MST, NMAS).
Revitalised by the Cuban Revolution, Nahuel Moreno, together with Santucho, founded the PRT (1965), which, three years later, broke into two: PRT (Santucho), Socialist Workers’ Party (Moreno), where the first prioritised armed struggle and the second had a classic policy of union work and agitation.
Although it carried out an important trade union task and was the target of Peronist and military repression after the coup, the PST would have a very minor role at the time: it was the rise of Guevarism.
And then came the decade of the ’80s, where Moreno’s remarkable political flair, which adopted a democratic and more nationalist discourse, allowed Trotskyism to achieve, for the first time, the hegemony of the left and conquer two seats in Congress: it was the golden age of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS).
However, after being the largest Trotskyist party in the world, the MAS broke into a thousand pieces between 1988 and 1992, after the fierce internal struggle that unleashed the death of Nahuel Moreno (1987), giving rise to most of the Trotskyist parties and groups of today.
Thus, Trotskyism achieved the hegemony of the left on two pillars: the trade union task and a democratic and nationalist discourse.
This second aspect is key because it is, until then, the most efficient way to bring Trotskyism out of ostracism and reach the political front pages.
The democratist and openly nationalist turn (aspects that are also at Trotsky’s root) that Nahuel Moreno imprints on local Trotskyism, masterfully anticipating the need for the strategic shift that will cause the fall of the Wall and the dissolution of the USSR, will be key to the subsequent development of the current.
Adónde va el PTS
The Socialist Workers Party (PTS) was founded in 1988, as a result of the breakup of a group of MAS youth, who criticised the party leadership for being «bourgeoisified» and dedicating, what a paradox, only to electoral work, neglecting theoretical training and insertion in the factories.
The PTS, therefore, was born with a workerist, trade union and orthodox profile, characteristics that prevented it from having the development that, in the ’90s, would have, on the one hand, the MST (breakup of the MAS in 1992) more inclined to the electoral strategy (it forms the United Left together with the PCA) and, on the other, the Workers’ Party (PO), which got fully involved in the organization of the unemployed and, on the other, therefore, he will be one of the protagonists of the piquetero movement.
By orthodoxy, precisely, the PTS does not participate in the piquetero movement, but yes, towards the end and before 2001, it joins with the organisation of some recovered factories (Zanon, Bruckman), but it continues behind the PO and the MST, which is the star of the stage.
During Kirchnerism, it gained relevance due to the rise of the trade union struggle and the decline of the MST. From that position, he formed, together with the new leader of the left, the PO, the Left and Workers Front (FIT), an electoral alliance.
The ebb of the trade union struggle, together with the «plank» of Kirchnerism and, above all, the appearance of Podemos, the French NPA and Syriza, in any case, do not pass in vain for the PTS, which incorporates Gramsci, and begins to turn by correctly reading the changes of the conjuncture.
First, from Gramsci, the PTS will use the notions of «organic» or «conjunctural» crisis to characterise 2001 and the Kirchnerist period, which it considers «progressive» due to «higher levels of justice and equity» (1).
That is, it argues that the power struggle is not and was not proposed, that union action is insufficient and does not appeal to the new social actors (feminism, environmentalism, indigenism, youth). And that the FIT, after the electoral success of 2011, is the channel to reach those new subjects that form the basis of Kirchnerism, which, on top of that, is heading towards defeat.
While the PO continues to stick to its classic union script, the PTS, with a good conjunctural reading, abandons unionism and orthodoxy, takes off the brown jumpsuit and dresses, together with Nico Del Caño, as young and cool, in defense no longer of a homogeneous working class, but in defense of workers, women and youth trying to occupy the vacant place left by Kirchnerism by taking as its candidate Daniel Scioli.
With this turn, in the 2015 elections, he defeated the PO, retired Jorge Altamira, and emerged as the new leader of the left.
The unexpected triumph in the 2015 PASO of the PTS, on the one hand, «retired» Jorge Altamira and allowed the rise of an unknown young man, Nico Del Caño, as the visible figure of the left and, on the other, gave the PTS the leadership of the Left Front.
The success of the PTS, as we said, is not because it appealed to the «backward» masses or because it «washed» the program, but because it was able to see what the rest did not see: the need to fill the vacancy left by Kirchnerism, to understand the exhaustion of trade unionism and the insufficiency of a homogeneous policy for a smaller fraction of the class and to express the sectoral demands (women, women, youth) that until then had been expressed by progressivism.
Notes:
Deja un comentario