Like so many nations that have heard the siren call of populism, Argentina was a deeply unequal county when, 75 years ago today, an anti-establishment candidate decisively won a presidential election. Two decades before that, the nation had boasted the eighth-largest economy in the world; its capital, Buenos Aires, was seen as the “Paris of the Americas”, glittering with the wealth of an Anglo-Argentine upper class. But beyond this elite, poverty was rife, and when the Depression struck, the city, like so many around the world, had been flooded with struggling poor, from the rural “interior”. Urban poverty spiralled out of control.

Things improved, a little, during the Second World War. Having to manage without imports prompted a rise in manufacturing industry. A new military government, which took power in June 1943, needed the working class — the so-called descamisados, or “shirtless ones” — on their side. And so the administration created a new post: Secretary of Labour. It was filled by the man who came to be known as “Argentina’s First Worker”, Colonel Juan Domingo Perón.

Spearheading redistributive policies, Perón won the hearts and minds of the descamisados. He announced, early 1946, that he was running for president, in a speech that criticised oligarchy and foreign interference, which he claimed was abetted by the coalition of traditional parties he stood against. The 52-year-old won what was widely recognised as Argentina’s cleanest-ever election, held on 24 February 1946. The final results, announced in April, had Perón at nearly 1.5 million votes, versus the 1.2 million for the establishment candidate. The traditional coalition his opponent represented, arrayed against the popular colonel, were shocked by the defeat; they genuinely believed that a man disliked by the establishment could not enjoy widespread support. But the descamisados had made their opinion known.

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Populist appeals these days are addressed primarily to those who feel downwardly mobile. But in 1940s Argentina, the working classes increasingly felt buoyed by greater possibilities and rising expectations. They were proud of their nation, but saw the traditional powers as exploitative investors to be curbed rather than as a threat. Perón assured would-be voters in his candidacy speech that he would collaborate with other nations, but on the basis of equality. His brand of populism, like modern-day versions, certainly mobilised the working class as a source of power; but it also genuinely boosted their position. Perón, rather than exploiting the working class, seemed to believe that his interests were identical to theirs: that he knew the solutions and was the best person to implement them.

Perón showed his genuine concern for the ordinary person while secretary of labour. He engineered a remarkable series of reforms: labour courts, minimum wages, paid holidays and sick pay. Labour rights were extended, for the first time, to rural workers. Child labour was regulated. Industrial workers gained substantial wage increases. Perón’s Secretariat also actively encouraged unionisation, promising that, unlike in the past, unions would negotiate benefits for their members. Of course, the advantages for Perón in the creation of this institutional support base were an equally important motivation. But the unions did make life better for his descamisados.

Perón also took very public charge of the relief efforts surrounding the January 1944 earthquake in San Juan — fundraising for it introduced him to his wife, the equally charismatic radio actress Eva Duarte. Both were unconventional — illegitimate children, she an actress of dubious reputation and he a man of mixed-race heritage — and both of them grated on polite society. This, of course, only increased their appeal in the eyes of their most devoted supporters. The Peróns, unlike some of today’s better-known populist leaders, could genuinely claim to understand and have shared the social and economic challenges the working classes faced.

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In some ways, Perón did not let the descamisados down when he assumed the highest office. The flurry of pro-poor and anti-elite measures continued. With the economy unusually flush after the Second World War, he embarked on a round of nationalisations, taking utilities and railways out of foreign hands and bringing them under state control (albeit at excessive cost). The government also invested in health and public education, with a political programme often decried as demagogic, yet in fact based largely on that of the post-War Labour government in London. It put money into schools, hospitals, nursing training and tertiary education for workers, as well as holiday hotels for union members. Through the Eva Perón Foundation, low-cost homes were built. For Argentina’s hitherto ignored marginalised classes, they had truly never had it so good.

This was partly to do with Perón’s rhetoric. Despite his anti-oligarch and anti-imperialist stance, his was a more optimistic brand of populism than that espoused more recently in countries from the United States to Hungary. He of course shared some qualities with more recent populist figures, not least a talent for using mass media to get his message across — radio propaganda was the Twitter of its day. Yet his was generally a message of hope and prosperity for all, whereas today’s populists tend to be exclusionary.

Take Budapest’s propagandistic use of the term “cosmopolitanism” to deride “foreign” figures such as George Soros — compared with Perón’s attempts at inclusiveness (despite frequent claims of Nazi sympathies, he was the first Argentine president to denounce anti-Semitism and actively courted the large Jewish community). And faced with an imminent coup in 1955, Perón stepped down and left the country, rather than urging his supporters to fight and risk mounting casualties. His was an idealistic populism — naïve, even.

Perón was plagued with the same problem as all populist governments: his depended on personality, rather than a clear ideology. The government headed by Perón and Evita — a first lady with no elected post but who arguably came to wield at least as much power as her husband — used its power capriciously. It had little regard for legal forms, and, as time went on, dissent was increasingly repressed. Perón was also deliberately vague about any supposed ideological content in his Peronist Party (due to his frequently expressed belief that “if I define, I exclude”). Indeed, he defined his foreign policy, the so-called Third Position, as being on the Left, in the centre or on the Right according to the circumstances. Like any populist, he wanted to be all things to all people.

And despite a good stint in office, President Perón was never able to generate good economic management and sustained growth. The boom-bust cycles that had characterised the previous 50 years continued (and continue to this day). Perónism, like populist regimes throughout history, had reacted to immediate problems with short-term solutions, but stuttered when it came to the long-term.

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Populism often grows out of a lack of institutions, but is ironically ill-suited to creating them; its focus is more on fighting fires than laying groundwork, on individual decision-making than strong policies. A country cannot be run by one man. It needs strong institutions. But for the charismatic, self-obsessed leaders who often head up populist governments, institutions are seen as a threat, because they create a framework that can make them redundant. So any benefits that populists bring a nation are invariably unsustainable. Perón’s achievements were ultimately and quite swiftly dismantled by the military government that overthrew him and sought to erase him and his supporters from history (a counterproductive approach that would only bolster his support in coming years.)

Now, Perón’s legacy is still a source of polarisation in Argentina. For many, he wrecked the nation permanently, while for others he dragged it into the modern age and gave the working classes an enduring political weight. Millions saw their wages increase and were able to buy a house or go on holiday for the first time. Thousands were beaten up for not shouting ‘Viva Perón’, or forced to join the president’s party to retain their jobs. As Perón liked to say, ‘the only truth is reality’.

The West today, like Argentina in 1946, is deeply unequal. As the middle classes have become more precarious, calls for a rebalance have mounted. It’s worth remembering that populists like Perón are skilled at channelling popular frustrations and shaping media narratives — and prone to demagogic outbursts and authoritarian tendencies when in power. Such leaders grow out of divisions that they skilfully exploit but rarely heal — no matter how immediately successful their policies — and sometimes generate backlash that only exacerbates those divisions. Yet they are also a symptom as well as a cause; they flourish in systems with deep pre-existing problems that last a lot longer than they do.

Jill Hedges’s Juan Perón: The Life of the People’s Colonel is published in May.

Argentina is the utopian dream that never quite came to pass. In Radiografía de la pampa, written in 1933 in response to the first of the coups, the poet and essayist Ezequiel Martínez Estrada wrote of the pain of being an exile, depicting an Argentina that was forever European but not Europe. That sense of dislocation has become a common theme: after the massacres of its indigenous population throughout the 19th century, Argentina became, for theorists at least, a tabula rasa.

That encouraged a utopianism, a sense that this was a land in which a new, better society could be created, unhindered by pre-existing structures and traditions. Argentina is a land of myth, where messiahs have always had their place. The first Europeans who went there were dreaming of El Dorado. Juan Perón, the arch-populist, all things to all men, and Evita perhaps even more so, inspired a faith far beyond what was justified.

By the 1920s, there was a wave of nostalgia for an idealised version of the life of the gaucho, whose unflinching self-reliance, alone on the pampas, was seen as embodying the soul of Argentina. In the pages of El Gráfico, the hugely influential sports magazine, it was argued that in a rapidly urbanising world that spirit was best represented in the pibe, the kid from the streets. Everything was in opposition to the British, whose wire fencing had undermined the political power of the gaúchos, leading for a time to a quasi-colonial relationship.

Football had come to Argentina through the British, through sailors and merchants, propagated through the British schools that catered to the elite. Their game, played on wide grassy pitches, was based on running and power; the Argentinian game grew from mass games on the uneven ground of the potreras, the vacant lots of the burgeoning city, where close control and streetwiseness were essential

In 1928, Borocotó, the great editor of El Gráfico, described a putative statue to the soul of Argentinian football. It would depict, he wrote, a mischievous urchin, tough and skilful, with a mass of untamed hair, who had learned the game on the streets. Half a century before the fact, he describes Maradona.

El Diego arrived with the force of prophecy behind him. He was celebrated and indulged. Exam results were fixed, his excesses and occasional tantrums ignored. Laws and conventions did not apply to him, either metaphorically on the pitch, or actually, off it. Nobody inspired such faith. In Mexico in 1986, he was recovering from hepatitis and injury, he was doubted on all sides, he had been sent off in the previous tournament, and yet he won them the World Cup. His talent was otherworldly; he was not a man to whom the usual rules applied. In crisis, turn to the Messiah.

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But Maradona by then was in a crisis far worse than that of eight years earlier. His time at Napoli, the team he inspired to the only two Serie A titles in their history, had come to an end when in March 1991 he tested positive for cocaine. The player had became a regular user after his move to Barcelona in 1982, but during his time in Naples he became increasingly dependent.

His body shape changed; between the World Cups of 1986 and 1990 he went from a stocky but lithe athlete to something approaching a more bloated figure. His relationship with the Camorra deteriorated. That he failed the drugs test was itself revealing: the protection he had once enjoyed, using a plastic penis to deliver somebody else’s urine for analysis, had been removed. Although he subsequently admitted he was an addict, he raged at the positive test. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” he said, “that it was Italy’s vendetta because Argentina knocked them out of the World Cup.”

Banned, he returned to Argentina. Within a month, he’d been arrested for possession of cocaine. That August, police raided his chauffeur’s apartment and found Maradona passed out after a day of heavy drinking and cocaine abuse. Finally, he accepted that he needed help. He began a radical detox programme, eating only fruit and vegetables and drinking only water. He started going to a gym regularly and jogging round the boating lake in the Plaza Holanda. A psychotherapist encouraged him to cut the bad influences from his life.

But what he actually needed, he decided, was football. When the judge Amelia Berraz de Vidal asked him what drugs he’d dealt in, he replied, “The only thing that I’ve dealt in my life is football.” He started playing again for a local side and in charity games. When his ban expired, he moved to Spain to play for Sevilla, but his 26 league games there were overshadowed by scandal. He was arrested for driving a Porsche at 200km/h, was involved in a brawl outside a nightclub where he’d been denied entry for wearing trainers, and was blamed for an incident that ended in a magazine exposé of the whole team going to a brothel. When he was substituted in the following game, he raged at the “betrayal” and never played for the club again.

He returned to Argentina and started using again. When his daughter Djalma caught him snorting a line in the bathroom, he returned to his father’s home village of Esquina, up the Paraná River from Buenos Aires, to dry out. That October, a month after Colombia’s 5-0 win, he signed for Newell’s Old Boys in Rosario (at half-time on his debut, a six-year-old boy performed tricks with a ball to entertain the crowd: Lionel Messi).

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The following month, he was recalled to the national side for a World Cup qualifying play-off against Australia. He set up a goal in the first leg as Argentina scraped through 2-1 on aggregate. By February, after just seven games for them, frustrated at the training schedule, he quit Newell’s.

Nobody knew what that meant for the World Cup. Could he go to the US if he didn’t have a club? Later that month, a group of journalists seeking to find out gathered outside his country house in Moreno, where he was relaxing with his father, uncle and a number of friends. Maradona asked them to leave. They said they would if he gave them a brief statement, which he refused to do. One of his friends sprayed the journalists with a garden hose. Another pretended to masturbate. Maradona then took an air rifle, leant on the roof of a car and shot at the journalists, injuring four. They sued. Two accepted an out-of-court settlement but the other two pressed on.

The public mood was broadly supportive of Maradona. Heroes were heroes, each flaw seemingly heightening the appeal; of course the pibe got up to mischief — how could he not? If, as the sociologist Sergio Levinsky argued, the veneration of the pibe was at some level rooted in a desire for him not to grow up, to remain childlike, then how could he be expected to take responsibility?

As the case proceeded, Maradona announced he was willing to captain the national side at the World Cup. The public reaction was euphoric. He was unfit, had no club, was fighting legal action in two countries and was battling drug addiction, but the Messiah was available. The national coach Alfio Basile had no option but to select him for a game against Brazil in March 1994. He was overweight, out-of-sorts and substituted at half-time.

Three months later, as the World Cup began, Maradona looked sleek. His explosive pace may have gone, but he was still sharp enough to orchestrate a 4-0 win, scoring the third goal after a couple of smart one-twos and a precise shot from the edge of the box. His celebration would become notorious as he raced to a television camera and roared. At the time, it seemed like nothing more than the relief of a man delighted to be back, the release of something deep within him. It soon drew more sinister interpretations.

Argentina beat Nigeria 2-1 in their next game, in Foxborough, after which Maradona was chosen for a random drugs test, which he gave blithely enough. The footage of him being led off the pitch by a nurse, cheerily waving to the crowd is poignant in its banality; this was the last the international game would see of him. The test was positive for substances aimed at suppressing the appetite and increasing endurance. Maradona was withdrawn from the World Cup and subsequently given a fifteen-month ban from football. “I killed myself training and now they do this to me!” Maradona complained, as though his effort somehow outweighed the fact he had broken the rules. He then broke down in tears.

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In Buenos Aires, there was an astonishing public outpouring of grief, comparable only to that at Perón’s funeral — the link between the events strengthened by the fact that the positive drug test arrived on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Perón.

Maradona insisted this was a conspiracy, claiming Fifa, with its Brazilian president João Havelange, had been out to get him since he had pretty much single-handedly eliminated Brazil from the previous World Cup. The truth was far less complex: he’d been taking drugs — recreational if not necessarily performance-enhancing — for years and had finally been caught. There were no plastic penises in Foxborough. He’d dropped 20kg in around six months, something he put down to hard work. He claimed the US version of a particular supplement had contained ephedrine, while the one available in Argentina didn’t, but even if that is true the regulations are clear: the responsibility was his and his guilt was undeniable.

But Maradona couldn’t take responsibility. That was his tragedy. Pibes can never grow up, and messiahs can never be blamed — until the time comes for their crucifixion.

Angels with Dirty Faces: The Footballing History of Argentina, is published by Orion