Leaders of the Peronist movement of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Sergio Massa met André Janones, the Brazilian parliamentarian who created the “Lula Army,” the key WhatsApp network in the re-election of the Brazilian president, in Buenos Aires, with an eye on the Argentinian presidential elections in 2027. “Peronism is riding a winning wave,” a political analyst told Sputnik.The Peronist opposition is looking in Brazil for a formula to challenge Javier Milei for power in next year’s elections. As a reunion, some of the most prominent figures of Peronism held a meeting with Janones. He was received by the former president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández, and former presidential candidate Sergio Massa.The Brazilian strategist was accompanied by the publicists Chico Kertész and Rafael Marroquim, members of Sidonio Palmeira’s team, the current minister of Social Communication of Brazil and strategist of the ruling party’s campaign.The first meeting was with Massa and lasted for about two hours, focusing on the Brazilian experience.Then, the delegation visited Cristina Fernández in her Buenos Aires apartment, where she is under house arrest since the Supreme Court confirmed, in June 2025, her six-year sentence in a case widely considered as lawfare, in addition to a lifetime disqualification from holding public office. According to Janones himself, Fernández was interested in how the result was built on social media.The appeal of the model lies in the magnitude of the comeback. In the first round on October 4, Flavio Bolsonaro obtained 47.03% of the valid votes, compared to Lula’s 45.16%. Three weeks later, the incumbent won the runoff with 51.76%, something unprecedented since the return of democracy in Brazil.Janones’ strategy was central to that shift. Before the runoff, his WhatsApp channel had around 50,000 followers; on election day, it surpassed 10 million. The scheme was based on daily “missions” to share videos, establish slogans, and make content viral in a decentralized manner, with activists producing their own pieces from tutorials sent by the channel.A study by the Brazilian consultancy Ipse Global compared Janones’s network to “Tropa do Flávio,” the rival campaign channel, which concluded the electoral process with two million members compared to the ruling party’s 10.5 million. According to that survey, for every active user in the opposition group, around 35 Lula supporters were mobilized, a gap that translated into speed and scale of dissemination.The connection is not new. In 2023, after the Argentinian presidential primaries won by Javier Milei, about 20 advisors associated with Brazil’s ruling Workers’ Party (PT) settled in Buenos Aires to work on the audiovisual and digital strategy of Massa, then minister of Economy (2022-2023) and candidate of Union for the Homeland. The Peronist candidate won the first round but lost the runoff with 44% of the votes compared to Milei’s 56%.Janones’s visit comes amid a full-blown dispute for the Argentinian opposition leadership. The governor of the province of Buenos Aires, the most populous in the country, Axel Kicillof, distanced from Fernández, did not participate in the meetings, which left the former president and Massa as the only interlocutors. From Brazil, the PT clarified that the meetings do not imply Lula’s endorsement of any of the potential Argentinian candidates.In parallel, just days before the Brazilian election, the WhatsApp channel “Ejército del Peronismo” (army of Peronism) emerged in Argentina, linked to Massa and inspired by Janones’s model, who recorded a video in Spanish to invite people to join. The channel has around 70,000 followers and has set a goal to reach 100,000 before November 17, the date on which Peronism celebrates its Day of Activism, one year before the presidential elections.Peronism wants to copy the method“Peronism is riding a winning wave, as all politicians generally do, but it seems to me that Lula’s victory surprised many … even almost all the polls,” Juan Adaro, political scientist and director of the consultancy Pulso Research, told Sputnik. According to the analyst, the Argentinian opposition “is trying to capitalize on this moment and to latch onto Lula’s victory.”According to the expert, this explains “the photo with Cristina and the meeting with Massa,” which aim to “articulate a regional movement and not just a national one.” However, he downplayed the significance of the tool. “I believe that Peronism has a lot to learn from Lula. You do not win an election just with a WhatsApp group or with this method of digital organization,” he said.Nevertheless, the specialist emphasized that the main weakness of the opposition lies in social media. “Peronism has a lot to learn in that area because, nowadays, it is lagging behind in terms of digital conversation,” he remarked. In contrast, he pointed out that the right, on a global level, “understood the digital conversation and how to reach it better,” and has “a bunch of communicators.”Consulted by Sputnik, Santiago Giorgetta, political analyst at Proyección Consultores, focused on the method that supported the Brazilian government’s comeback. “In Lula’s strategy, there is something about the communication order, which allowed the campaign to abruptly change from the proposal made in the first round to the proposal on how to face the runoff,” he stated.The political scientist identified in that ability to reorder the message between the first and second rounds the main lesson for an Argentinian opposition that today faces Milei with several voices in dispute. “The communicational order with clear slogans, with few topics to address, seems to me to be what Peronism can adopt,” he stated.The limits of the internal struggleGiorgetta emphasized that the main significance of the meetings goes beyond the strategic. “It has to do with Lula positioning himself very strongly in the region, making everything available so that next year Milei loses the elections,” he said. He defined it as the regional reference “that contrasts economic policies” with the Argentinian government.However, Giorgetta warned that Peronism’s division is the main obstacle. “Since there are no solid points of convergence, there cannot be a communicational order … The limit is internal,” he commented.As he explained, the strength of the Brazilian model is not replicable in Argentina. “The Lula team is the president himself, because there is an unrestricted alignment toward the main leader that the PT has.”Adaro agreed that Peronism lacks what Brazil had: “a candidate with undisputed leadership who could compete in the elections.” On the contrary, “the opposition leader is in prison and is unable to compete for public office, so that leadership does not exist or no one is exercising that leadership that should be in order to head toward a positive election next year.”“Today, Peronism is mired in a struggle between egos and leaderships to see who gets the candidacy,” Adaro remarked about the opposition. According to him, the Peronist leaders “are not discussing fundamental issues or what they want to do with the country or how they are going to change or how they are going to reactivate consumption in Argentina,” something he considers essential to build a proposal. (Sputnik)Translation: Orinoco TribuneOT/SC/CD