Election results are promising but the road remains long for Argentina

Macri won the election with the promise of change, but change has frequently been Argentina's downfall as it's lurched from right to left. Celebrations will be short: there is much work to be done

Opposition presidential candidate Mauricio Macri celebrates after defeating ruling party candidate Daniel Scioli (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

A couple of my neighbours set off fireworks from their balconies as the election results came in last night, while in the street below, motorists began beeping their horns as if Argentina had just won the World Cup, so elated are some to see the back of the governing Frente Para la Victoria (Victory Front).

Most, however, wait with baited breath to see what exactly Mauricio Macri's victorious Cambiemos alliance will change. Throughout the campaign the mayor of Buenos Aires city denied accusations that he planned to take the country back to its disastrous flirtation with neo-liberalism in the 1990s, and in the end voters were so tired of current president Cristina Fernández's authoritarian style that they decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The celebrations won't last long. The epic election process, with three rounds of voting that have left both politicians and the public exhausted, leaves the president elect just over two weeks to assemble a government from a hodgepodge alliance of different political actors. It remains to be seen how he will see good on his promise to relax currency controls without provoking a stampede for US dollars and an inflation-inducing devaluation, and whether his blue eyes and funky dance moves are really enough to attract the foreign investment the country needs if he is to keep his promise to maintain social programmes and the state subsidy of gas and electricity consumption. There's also the question of how he's going to be able to do anything at all with a minority in congress, and with state bodies and companies such as the public TV channel and national airline Aerolineas Argentinas effectively run as arms of the governing political party rather than possessions of the state.

Macri won the election with the promise of change, but change has frequently been Argentina's downfall as it's lurched from right to left, with each successive government ripping up the previous administration's work. Despite the corruption scandals, attacks on the justiciary and an inability to control inflation, the governments of Cristina Fernández and her late husband Nestor Kirchner before her, have achieved things. Their import controls increased prices but increased national production and created employment, while the introduction of universal child benefit helped many of the poorest families. The change most voters want to see is a move towards more democratic, less divisive and less authoritarian government, and not a lurch to the right and the disaster of the 1990s. It's up to Macri to prove his critics wrong and show that this is what he plans to deliver.