Buenos Aires province Governor Axel Kicillof said he had sent a letter to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanding an investigation into the lender’s managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, after she made comments that were widely interpreted as a call to vote for President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza ruling party in the upcoming mid-term elections.

“With her comments about the Argentine elections and her explicit support for the ruling party, she violated the IMF’s guidelines and her duty to be impartial,” Kicillof wrote in an X post.

The governor demanded her “immediate rectification and an internal investigation to determine whether her removal is necessary.”

Georgieva denied on Friday that her calls for Argentina to “stay the course” intended to tell Argentines how to vote. She said the remarks were meant as a call for the government to maintain its current policies and avoid temptation to yield in the face of voter pressure.

Chainsaw lapel pin

Georgieva also received a lapel pin shaped like a chainsaw — the power tool that symbolizes Milei’s public sector cuts — from Deregulation Minister Federico Sturzenegger. The pair then posed for photographs wearing the pins. Kicillof described the pin as “partisan” and called it “absolutely unprecedented.”

On Thursday, Georgieva mentioned Argentina’s upcoming elections later this year when asked about the risks the country could face during a press conference at the 2025 Spring Meetings of the World Bank and IMF that are taking place in Washington, D.C.

“Domestically, the country is going to go to elections, as you know, in October, and it is very important that they do not derail the will for change. We do not see that risk materializing, but I would urge Argentina, stay the course,” she said, in what many took as a thinly veiled call to vote for the ruling party in the legislative elections.

“Argentina has demonstrated that this time it is different,” Georgieva said. “This time there is decisiveness to put the economy on a soundtrack from high deficit to surplus.”

In response, Kicillof said: “The IMF must not rule over the decisions made by the Argentine government, and much less so over the electoral will of the Argentine people.” 

Former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner likewise blasted Georgieva’s comments on X. “THE ‘CHANGE’ YOU CELEBRATE RUINED US,” she wrote in a lengthy post, noting that former President Mauricio Macri — who made Argentina’s 2018 IMF deal — also campaigned on the ideal of “change.”

“AND NOW IT’S BACK, IN A STRONGER FORM, AT THE HAND OF MILEI. Yeah, I’m sure ‘change’ is back… The change that suits you lot, Kristalina!”

On Thursday, the Peronist Justicialista party lambasted Georgieva in a post on X, calling her words “an electoral intrusion.”