Left-wing parties, picket groups and grassroots unions marched in Buenos Aires on Saturday, September 19, 2026, against President Javier Milei’s 2027 budget proposals, including a move to repeal a disability law and underfund public universities. The Marcha de la Bronca, or March of Anger, ran from Congress to Plaza de Mayo, beside the presidential palace. That route said plenty. Power sat at one end, people at the other, and the marchers moved straight through the city’s ceremonial corridor to make the point in public.
Who Took to the Streets
The Buenos Aires column gathered at Plaza Congreso at 15:30 and marched along Avenida de Mayo. Organizers also announced gatherings in more than 30 other cities, including Rosario, Córdoba, Mendoza and Salta. The march was organized by left-wing parties and grassroots unions, while the main union federation, the CGT, did not back it. The CGT and the CTA federations did not formally endorse the march. That left the action in the hands of those willing to move without the blessing of the big labor apparatus.
Leading figures included deputies Myriam Bregman and Nicolás del Caño of the Left Front, a Trotskyist alliance, and Eduardo Belliboni of Polo Obrero, a movement of unemployed workers. Bregman was described as the main promoter of the idea, and she said, “We propose transforming anger into organisation and mobilisation.” Hospital workers from the Garrahan, Argentina’s leading children’s hospital, were expected to join, along with rank-and-file union branches. The joint closing document called for higher wages and pensions, a ban on layoffs, repeal of the labour reform, a national strike and a break with the IMF, the International Monetary Fund.
What the Budget Hits
Milei, described as a libertarian economist, took office in December 2023 promising deep spending cuts to end chronic deficits. His 2027 budget, filed on September 15, promised a fourth straight year of fiscal surplus, according to La Nación. The state’s arithmetic, as usual, lands on the backs of people who need services, wages and pensions, while the surplus gets treated like a moral virtue.
In 2025, Congress passed a law for people with disabilities and another for public universities, then overrode Milei’s vetoes with two-thirds majorities. The government promulgated both laws but suspended the parts that cost money, citing a lack of funding. Courts later ordered it to apply the university law, and unions said it still had not complied. The new budget proposed repealing the disability emergency law outright, according to Infobae and La Nación. That’s the machinery of rule in plain sight: lawmakers vote, the executive stalls, courts order compliance, and the people who depend on the laws wait while the budget gets used as a choke chain.
Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, won more than 40% of the vote in the October 2025 midterm elections, NPR reported, giving him enough seats in the lower house to make future vetoes much harder to override. The ballot box didn’t settle the conflict. It just rearranged the leverage.
Who Pays for “Fiscal Surplus”
Argentina pays non-contributory disability pensions, and 1,148,484 people received one in March 2026, according to figures cited by Perfil. In April, the pension was worth 266,000 pesos a month, about US$176, plus a 70,000-peso bonus, about US$46. From 2024, the national disability agency, ANDIS, audited recipients and suspended 65,789 pensions, Chequeado reported in August 2025. The same report found that 46% of the audit letters had never reached their recipients. The agency was later hit by leaked audio in which its former head, Diego Spagnuolo, allegedly discussed bribes.
On September 4, 2026, officials told deputies that about 150,000 cancelled pensions had been restored with back pay, El Litoral reported. The 2027 budget would require a medical finding that a person cannot work, instead of a disability certificate, and would end automatic inflation updates for disability service fees, La Nación reported. Service providers said they were owed more than 340 billion pesos, about US$225 million, in emergency compensation. The centre-right PRO bloc said the proposal “completely changes the discussion.”
The university dispute centered on the pay of lecturers and staff, and on student grants. Law 27.795 orders the state to restore staff salaries lost to inflation since December 2023 and to update student grants. A federal appeals court confirmed an injunction on March 31, 2026, and the Supreme Court rejected the government’s final appeal in late June. Unions said salaries still trailed inflation by about 32.5% since Milei took office, according to Actualidad a Diario. At talks on Thursday, September 17, the government offered 3% for September and 3% for October, and all unions rejected it.
The 2027 budget allotted 7.3 trillion pesos, about US$4.8 billion, to national universities, while the national council of university rectors had asked for about 11 trillion pesos, US$7.3 billion. Teaching unions called strikes for September 18 and 22 and a fifth national university march for October 15. In Buenos Aires, the October march will head to the federal courts to press for compliance. The legal route remains open, but the institutions have already shown how much they enjoy ignoring their own orders.
The government said Argentina’s recovery depends on never again spending money it does not have. Milei told his cabinet that “populism cannot be beaten with more populism,” La Nación reported. On disability, officials said the pension system was riddled with fraud, including non-existent addresses and unmet medical requirements. Its April bill on the issue was titled the law “against disability pension fraud,” El Cronista reported.
The Security Ministry said it would apply its protocol against road blockades, with reinforced fencing at Congress and Plaza de Mayo. “Marching peacefully is a right, violence is not,” the ministry said, warning that those who cause damage will face consequences. The state wrapped the barricades in the language of order, then set the fences in place anyway.