Throughout his youth, Argentine politics centered on one man: Juan Domingo Perón, first elected president in 1946, when Bergoglio was nine. Even after Perón was ousted in a 1955 coup and sent into exile, his fanatical supporters remained. For decades to come, political debates centered around the populist movement—Peronism—founded by Perón and his equally charismatic first lady, Eva Duarte, better known by her nickname, Evita.
Years later, Bergoglio was coy about his views on Perón, although as a young man he had been an enthusiastic supporter. His adversaries in the Jesuits would later draw comparisons between the two men. They saw Perón’s influence in Bergoglio’s personality-driven, sometimes cold-blooded style of leadership. Bergoglio credited his early fascination with Argentine politics to the woman who, outside his family, was the most influential in his life: Esther Ballestrino, a feminist and self-declared Marxist who ran the chemistry lab where he worked as a teenager. She did not force her leftist views on him but instead “taught me to think about politics,” he remembered.
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