There is a paradox in outsider politics: what makes outsiders particularly strong when it comes to winning power can become a source of vulnerability once they attain it. They rise because they come from outside, because they do not speak like traditional politicians, and because they can present themselves as a break with discredited organizations, procedures, and intermediaries. But governing requires precisely those organizations, procedures, and intermediaries. The challenge, then, begins when the main virtue of these leaders—the fact that they are outsiders to the system—has to be transformed into political capacity without disappearing in the process.
Colombia and Argentina currently allow us to observe two different stages of this process. Abelardo de la Espriella has just entered the first. Javier Milei, by contrast, is already moving through the second. Colombia’s new president took office on August 7 without ever having held public office, after building his candidacy around a distinctly outsider identity. Milei, meanwhile, has already passed the halfway point of a term that also began with a nascent political organization and a limited parliamentary presence. They are two different snapshots of the same question: one thing is getting there, and quite another is building the conditions to remain there.
De la Espriella also had a start that no strategist could have designed. Just three days after taking office, a powerful earthquake struck the western part of the country, forcing the new government to immediately change all its priorities. A tragedy of such magnitude naturally transcends any political interpretation. But it also reminds us of a basic characteristic of governing: while campaigns allow politicians to choose their issues, opponents, and settings, power forces them to manage reality as it comes.
And reality almost always comes through intermediaries. Dealing with an emergency requires more than presidential leadership. It requires public officials, technicians, local governments, security forces, hospitals, specialized agencies, budgetary resources, international cooperation, and administrative chains that function when the cameras are not there. The Colombian earthquake thus turned the first hours of an outsider government into an immediate test of institutional coordination. It also highlighted the importance of issues that receive little attention during campaigns, such as transition processes between administrations and the ability to make inherited bureaucracies function.
This is perhaps the first lesson outsiders learn when they reach power: governing does not necessarily mean becoming like those who came before, but neither does it mean dispensing with everything that came before. Institutional politics has inertia and procedures because it must solve collective problems on a scale that no individual can manage alone. Learning those procedures does not mean abandoning the desire to change them. Quite the opposite: anyone seeking to transform the state must first ensure that the state is capable of responding.
Milei is at a different stage. He reached the Argentine presidency in 2023 with a recently formed political force and enormous territorial limitations. During his first years, La Libertad Avanza moved precisely toward building what it lacked: a party, political leaders, legislative blocs, and a presence across the provinces. In the 2025 legislative elections, it won more than 40% of the vote and strengthened its position in Congress. That greater strength allowed it to begin 2026 with a much more favorable legislative landscape than the one it faced when Milei assumed the presidency.
But this consolidation creates a new difficulty. Milei no longer needs to prove that he can break into the system; he needs to show that his project can endure. And endurance brings back something that every discourse of rupture initially tends to view with suspicion: agreements, allies, and intermediaries. Looking ahead to 2027, Argentina’s governing coalition has intensified talks with governors and reopened channels with Mauricio Macri’s PRO, while continuing to strengthen its own territorial organization. This is not necessarily a contradiction; it may instead represent an evolution.
Intermediation is not synonymous with old-style politics; it is a technology of democracy. Political parties aggregate interests, legislators build majorities, governors and local leaders connect territories, and public officials turn political decisions into public policies. The problem arises when these institutions become self-contained and cease to represent those they are supposed to serve. This deterioration is precisely where outsiders derive much of their strength. But there is a difference between challenging exhausted forms of intermediation and imagining that complex societies can be governed without any intermediation at all.
This is where the real test of maturity for these leaders lies. The successful outsider is not necessarily the one who remains permanently outside the system after conquering it, nor the one who immediately blends into it. Rather, it is the one who manages to preserve what justified their arrival in the first place: a certain credibility, a different perspective, and a promise of transformation, while learning the various capabilities required to exercise power. Their basic challenge is to institutionalize something new without bureaucratizing it to the point of making it unrecognizable.
That is why the debate over outsiders often goes wrong when it is limited to asking whether they are good or bad for democracy. Above all, they are an increasingly common way of accessing power in societies where longstanding structures have lost their capacity to represent citizens. The interesting question begins the day after winning an election: what do they do with what brought them there?
De la Espriella must quickly turn the energy of rupture into governing capacity, under circumstances infinitely more difficult than anticipated. Milei will have to demonstrate whether the organization and agreements he needs can expand his project without sacrificing its identity or competitiveness. They are different moments, but part of the same learning process. Governing requires learning from within. And enduring probably means managing to do both without forgetting why they got there in the first place.
Autor
PhD candidate in Political Science from the National University of San Martín and Master in Electoral Law, Parliamentary Law and Legislative Technique from the University of Castilla-La Mancha. Professor of Political Science at the Catholic University of Argentina, Austral University, University of El Salvador and National University of Tres de Febrero.
