Just as the 2014 Argentine presidential race was getting under way, Ernesto Laclau was interviewed by the conservative La Nación newspaper. Asked about the prospects of neoliberal candidate Mauricio Macri, he replied, “He has the same odds of becoming the constitutionally elected president of Argentina as I do becoming the emperor of Japan.”

Shortly after, Macri and his Cambiemos coalition pulled off a shock victory in the 2015 presidential race.

This year, Cambiemos achieved another vital win in the August 12 primary elections. More than an election, the primaries represented a nationwide straw poll to gauge the general political mood. The largest takeaway lesson is that Cambiemos, with a firm hold on one-third of the electorate, is the nation’s minority-majority party of choice, while the remaining two-thirds in the opposition finds itself completely fragmented among a half-dozen competing parties. The Left now has to come to grips with a sobering reality: Argentina’s first democratically elected right-wing party has shown itself capable of becoming the nation’s majority political force.