[9] Argentina's first government, autonomous from the Spanish Crown, can be traced back to May 1810 and the May Revolution, where an assembly of Argentines, called Primera Junta, took power.

After the Battle of Pavón in 1861, Buenos Aires set terms for its inclusion in the Constitution and the Republic of Argentina was born, with Bartolome Mitre as the President.

People altered their expectations and stopped investing in the system as the country experienced decades of regime changes after the 1930s, seeing both rules and rule-making processes being repeatedly overturned.

[18] Jorge Rafael Videla's dictatorship began in 1976 but fell into decline in 1982 after a defeat in the Falklands War (Spanish: Guerra de las Malvinas/Guerra del Atlántico Sur, 1982), and ended in 1983 with the democratic election of President Raúl Alfonsín of the Radical Civic Union party (UCR).

Alfonsín faced significant challenges, including a military uprising, and resigned in 1989, six months before the end of his term, but the country was not in clear danger of becoming subject to a dictatorship again.

Carlos Menem of the Justicialist Party (Peronist) served as president for ten years (1989-1999) and made a pact with Alfonsín in order to achieve a 1994 constitutional reform that would allow him to be re-elected.

Several short-lived interim presidents came and went until Congress chose Eduardo Duhalde of the Justicialist Party (Peronist) to rule until some sort of social and economic peace could be restored.

Both these parties and the provincial branches of the UCR and PJ have frequently been dominated by modern caudillos and family dynasties, such as the Sapags of Neuquén and the Rodríguez Saá's of San Luis.

While Menem and de la Rúa simply reduced their funding, Kirchner has effected an "ideological cleansing", removing a large portion of the top ranks and replacing them with younger leaders with an explicit commitment to preserve human rights and submit to the decisions of the civilian government.

Shortly after, in October 2000 Álvarez resigned after a scandal related to presidential bribes in the Senate (the President's party refused to support or investigate the accusations), so the Alliance (and even the FrePaSo) effectively broke down.

Moreover, in the midst of serious economic crisis and riots, President Fernando de la Rúa resigned on December 21, 2001, leaving the UCR reputation severely damaged.

Two of them scored well in the 2003 presidential election: Support for an Egalitarian Republic (ARI), formed on the initiative of Deputy Elisa Carrió, presented itself as a non-compromising front against corruption and for progressive ideas.

Her influence diminished afterward, as the Néstor Kirchner administration -running on center left policies- succeeded, and she took a more conservative stance, eventually dividing her party and founding a new alliance, the Civic Coalition.

The other splinter UCR party, called Recrear, was led by former De la Rúa Minister of Economy Ricardo López Murphy.

After meagre results for his 2005 senatorial candidacy, and ahead of the 2007 elections, he joined a group of Province-based parties and Macri's Commitment to Change in a new centre-right coalition dubbed Republican Proposal (Propuesta Republicana, PRO).

On 27 July 2008, the tax reform was put down by a votation at the Senate, which came to be decided by the vote of Vice President Julio Cobos, effectively breaking the governmental coalition Plural Consensus.

Since then, a fraction of dissident peronists allied with conservative PRO, Julio Cobos -through Federal Consensus (ConFe)- started negotiations with his former party, UCR.

For the 2009 legislative elections, former President Kirchner ran himself as a candidate to National Deputy on top of the Front for Victory (Frente para la Victoria, FPV) party in the Province of Buenos Aires.

This plan included the privatization of the previously state-owned telecommunications company, oil conglomerate (YPF), airline (Aerolíneas Argentinas), railroads and utilities.

As a result, large foreign direct investment flowed into Argentina for a short time, improving in some isolated cases the infrastructure and quality of service of those companies.

Elected with a popular mandate to reinvigorate the economy and crack down on the corruption of the Menem administration, de la Rúa was unable or unwilling to perform these tasks.

It was marked by the need to pacify the country and soften the impact of the crisis after the forced devaluation of the local currency, the peso, which had lost three quarters of its value in a matter of months.

Duhalde employed a mixture of traditional Peronist politics (in the form of a monetary subsidy for heads of families) and neo-Keynesian economic principles to stabilize the economy and bring peace to the streets.

Néstor Kirchner, who belonged to the moderate center-left wing of Peronism (rooted in the leftist Peronist factions of the 1970s), continued Duhalde's measures (even keeping his Minister of Economy, Roberto Lavagna) and added some heterodox economics.

The restrictive monetary policy of the 1990s has become aggressively expansive; the Central Bank has injected large amounts of cash into the economy and bought dollars from the free currency market in order to accumulate reserves.

Failure to comply on the part of Argentine beef producers has been met with a punitive suspension of exports, starting March 2006, intended to increase domestic supply (this was then softened to a quota system).

[32] She launched a conditional cash transfer program as well, called Asignación Universal por Hijo (AUH), which provided financial incentives to low-income or poor citizens for them to send their children to school and get vaccinated.

[34] On 10 December 2019, the Centre-Left Alberto Fernández of the Justicialist Party was inaugurated President, after defeating the incumbent Mauricio Macri in the 2019 Argentine general election.

[35] On 14 November 2021, the center-left coalition of Argentina's ruling Peronist party, Frente de Todos (Front for Everyone), lost its majority in Congress, for the first time in almost 40 years, in midterm legislative elections.

The election victory of the center-right coalition, Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change), meant a tough final two years in office for President Alberto Fernandez.