When Argentines vote in midterm elections on Oct. 26, the main issue is simple: Do they want to stabilize their economy once and for all?

The country’s economic future depends on whether voters can muster the political will to back President Javier Milei’s original coalition and his reform program — or backtrack by empowering opposition parties that promise more spending and debt default.

Economic stability has always been Argentina’s most elusive dream. For over eight decades, the country has lurched from crisis to crisis, trapped in a cycle of deficits, inflation and dashed hopes. Governments have repeatedly tried to restore order, and repeatedly failed — not for lack of effort, but because the necessary reforms never lasted long enough for confidence to take hold.

Argentina’s chronic weakness is fiscal indiscipline. Politicians tend to spend beyond the country’s means, issue debt they cannot credibly service, print money to cover the difference and then rely (explicitly or implicitly) on inflation and defaults to wipe out the value of the money and the debt they issued. The usual script plays out: Deficits cause the debt to grow and markets demand ever-higher interest rates on that debt, causing it to grow even faster until it surpasses the government’s ability to pay. The result is panic, hyperinflation and default.

There have been two major modern attempts to escape this trap — both bold, both promising, both ultimately undone.

In the early 1990s, President Carlos Menem and Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo introduced the Convertibility Plan, pegging the peso one-to-one to the U.S. dollar, slashing spending, liberalizing trade and adopting extensive financial reforms. The peg was meant to prevent the government from just printing money to pay for its deficits; instead, each peso had to be backed by a dollar in Argentina’s foreign exchange reserves. For a time, inflation vanished and growth returned.