Introduction

Juan Domingo Perón rose to power under the military dictatorship that had been established with the coup of June 1943. Partly motivated by the desire to prolong Argentina's neutrality in the world war – thus allowing for the continuation of relations with the Axis powers – this government took its guiding ideas from nacionalismo. Some historians, for example David Rock or Alberto Spektorowski, have interpreted the coup of 1943 as the direct outgrowth and the culmination of nacionalista agitation in the preceding decade. Perón himself, both as an officer during the 1930s and as a leading participant in the 1943 coup, had also become acquainted with authoritarian nationalist ideas, and in his speeches and writings frequently drew on them. But with the defeat of fascism in most of Europe, Perón eventually opted to dilute and side-line nacionalismo, relying on the working class as his primary support base. He thus expounded a type of nationalism with marked popular overtones, expanding the notion of belonging to the nation to hitherto excluded groups, for example through the extension of higher education, the introduction of female suffrage or welfare programmes. While it is difficult to distil an unchanging Peronist ideology, Perón's ideas were closer to the popular nationalism that had been propagated by FORJA in the late 1930s, which eventually eclipsed the nacionalistas’ stress on hierarchy, discipline and Catholicism. The bowdlerised fusion that Perón fashioned out of the various strands of nationalist thought that had emerged since the world Depression left a lasting imprint on Argentine politics and society. Like no other political movement in Argentina before or after, Peronism polarised public opinion, and it has continued to deeply influence the country's political imaginary until the present day. Since the ousting of Perón in a military coup in 1955, all efforts to eradicate the movement have proved futile. Since Perón's presidency, no non-Peronist president has ever managed to complete his term in office.

As a result, Peronism has become the most debated and researched topic in Argentine history, sociology and political science, while – on an international scale – there are few theories of populism that can do without referencing this paradigmatic Argentine variant. Scholarship on Peronism, which emerged after the coup of 1955, was for long dominated by debates about the movement's socio-economic origins.