alternatehistory.com

The Argentinian Socialist party was founded in 1894. It was very progressive and moderate, and quite sensible in terms of economic policy.

And it was internationalist, not nationalistic.

However, IOTL they could never penetrate in the deep interior of the country. Their strongholds were the city of Buenos Aires and the city of Rosario. The first socialist governor wasn’t elected till the year 2007 in Santa Fe.

Part of their problems during the first decades of the XX century was that, on the one hand, their natural electors, the urban workers, were foreigners and didn’t vote. Thus, if they had political inclinations, they tend to favour anarchists or anarcosyndicalists who advocated direct actions in order to get better working conditions, without passing through the Parliament. On the other hand, socialists didn’t find a good way to deliver their message to the poor native peasants of the northweast, who did vote. It was a problem of communication: they tended to speak more about European problems than of local ones, and they used a language they didn’t understand well. Finally, the farmers of European origin who populated the pampas tended more to vote for the radical party than for the socialists.

So, their voting base was pretty small: it was reduced to the few urban immigrants who had voluntary adquired the Argentinian citizenship and to the Argentinian-born sons of European immigrants who lived in big cities and belonged to the lower middle class.

But what if things were different? WI, for example, they had encouraged urban workers to get the Argentinian citizenship, telling them than in that way they could get representatives in the Parliament who would speak for them? WI a greater number of European immigrants had adquired the Argentinian citizenship, as it happened in the U.S.? And wi they had managed to get the vote of the small farmers of Southern Santa Fe, Entre Ríos and Cordoba, and of the tenants in the province of Buenos Aires?

Would this have butterflied away Peronism, a movement who has the majority of working class votes since 1946, and has dominated the unions ever since?

If so, how could the socialist party be stronger during the first half of the XX century? By "stronger" I mean not just winning pariamentary elections in the city of Buenos aires as they did OTL, but having several governors elected, and being a serious contendant for the presidency.
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