Half of Argentines say they can no longer wait for President Javier Milei's economic programme to improve their household finances, according to a new poll that exposes a widening gap between the growing confidence of international creditors and the patience of ordinary voters.

The survey, conducted by consultancy QSocial and released last week, found that 50% of the 1,323 respondents had run out of patience for government policy to produce tangible results in their personal finances. QSocial put the margin of error at plus or minus 2.9 percentage points. Just 20% said they were prepared to wait until the next presidential election in 2027, 10% set a deadline of the end of this year, and 8% said mid-2027; the remaining 12% offered no view.

The findings capture a paradox at the heart of Milei's presidency. Only days earlier, Kristalina Georgieva, the IMF's managing director, had used her first official visit to Buenos Aires to declare that Argentina was in a "much healthier position" than when Milei took office in December 2023, pointing to a fiscal surplus, cooling inflation and an improved credit profile. On the ground, voters appear far less persuaded that the pain has been worth it.

Asked to rate the current state of the country, just 16% of respondents called it good, against 35% who described it as regular and 48% who called it bad. There was some acknowledgment of progress: 31% said Argentina was better off than in December 2023, when Milei inherited an economy racked by triple-digit inflation. But the outlook skewed pessimistic, with 47% expecting the economy to worsen over the coming year, against 26% forecasting improvement and 21% expecting no change.

Jobs and poverty topped the list of concerns, each cited by 21% of respondents, followed by corruption on 19%, inflation on 11%, insecurity on 8% and the justice system on 6%. A majority, 61%, doubted the government's ability to address these problems, against 32% who believed it could. Perceptions of who benefits from Milei's policies were similarly unforgiving: 64% said the president governs for narrow sectors of society, against 25% who said he governs for the majority. On the central bargain of the firebrand libertarian’s programme — that short-term sacrifice will secure long-term gain — 67% rejected the idea that the austerity is necessary, and an identical share said the sacrifices being asked of Argentine society today would not pay off in the future.

That scepticism sits awkwardly with the Fund's rosy assessment, and with Argentina's unenviable standing as its single largest debtor. Buenos Aires owed the IMF roughly $60bn as of this spring, equivalent to about 10.5% of GDP and nearly four times the exposure of the second-largest borrower, a legacy of the record $57bn programme agreed in 2018 and the $20bn facility Milei signed on top of it, according to IMF data and analysis by Visual Capitalist. That scale of exposure gives Georgieva's assessment of Argentina's programme an added edge: the Fund has an unusually large stake in the adjustment succeeding.

Speaking in Buenos Aires alongside economy minister Luis Caputo on July 27, Georgieva ruled out any need for Argentina to seek fresh IMF financing in 2027 and said she did not expect the Fund to act as lender of last resort. She noted that Argentina had accumulated more than $13bn in foreign-exchange purchases this year, comfortably exceeding programme targets, while all three major rating agencies had upgraded the country's credit profile. She also pointed to more than $45bn in investment projects, mostly in oil and mining, already approved under Argentina's flagship RIGI incentive framework, with a pipeline more than twice that size still in the works, and singled out expansion in oil, gas, mining and agriculture. Yet, she cautioned that growth remained uneven and that the country still needed to create more formal jobs and broaden the recovery beyond its fastest-growing sectors. The Fund is forecasting growth of 3.5% this year and 4% in 2027, with annual inflation down to 33.5% in June from the triple-digit levels Milei inherited — though household loan delinquency has risen sharply, a reminder of how thinly stretched many family budgets remain.

In a blog post following the visit, Georgieva framed Argentina's turnaround in generational rather than quarterly terms, likening the country's task to Lionel Messi's long, unglamorous path to a World Cup winner's medal at 35. "Restoring stability is difficult," she wrote. "Making it endure is even harder. The greatest rewards come only after years of persistence." She drew on her own experience of Bulgaria's hyperinflation in the 1990s — when, she recalled, her mother's savings vanished and she kept her own money in a tin box — to argue that the benefits of stabilisation "did not appear immediately" there either, and took years to show up in higher living standards. She also recounted meeting a Buenos Aires make-up artist who works three jobs and told Georgieva that although her own circumstances "have not changed overnight", she hopes the country stays the course.

It is that very divide — between a hope-filled macroeconomic narrative measured in years and a much gloomier household experience measured in weekly budgets — that the latest QSocial poll lays bare. The Fund and the government can point to a shrinking fiscal deficit, improving investor confidence, rebuilding reserves and returning market access as evidence that the adjustment is working. But for a majority of Argentines, two and a half years into Milei's presidency, those gains have yet to be felt at the kitchen table, and patience is wearing thin well before the 2027 election that both sides increasingly treat as the programme's real deadline.