Alberto Fernandez, with Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner as his running mate, likely to unseat Mauricio Macri, polls show.

About 34 million Argentines will head to the polls on Sunday in an election widely expected to cement the end of President Mauricio Macri's term.

Most opinion surveys predict Alberto Fernandez, the centre-left leader of the Frente de Todos (Front for All) opposition ticket, will soundly beat Macri, who leads a coalition known as Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change).

Fernandez's running mate is former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a divisive and powerful political figure in the country. The pair won the presidential primaries in August by a surprising 16-point margin.

Argentines are angry over the country's struggling economy and the austerity measures put in place under Macri.

"You come to La Matanza, and you say Macri, and you're uttering a bad word," said 32-year-old Jose Galeano, a bus driver who navigates the modest neighbourhoods of La Matanza, a county in the densely-populated and poverty-stricken "conurbano" region of Buenos Aires.

Macri rose to power in 2015 on a promise to kick start the economy, but his free-market policies have not delivered and austerity cuts have made life harder for many Argentines. More than one-third of the country lives below the poverty line, unemployment is at 10.6 percent, and the rate of inflation is expected to hit 55 percent this year.

President Mauricio Macri, the son of a real estate tycoon and former head of Boca Juniors football club, leads the centre-right Republican Proposal party (PRO by its Spanish initials), which is part of an electoral coalition called Commitment to Change.

Macri says the solution to the country’s current economic crisis is not a return to protectionism, but more jobs. He wants to create a million and a half of them in the private sector by stimulating tourism, agriculture and the creative industries, as well as cutting taxes for younger workers and regulating more of the informal sector — which accounts for roughly a third of jobs in Argentina. Macri has also pledged to crack down on the sale of drugs, touting his record so far in office, with an unprecedented 80,000 drug-related detentions nationwide.

Macri’s rival Alberto Fernández served as cabinet chief to his running mate’s husband, Néstor Kirchner (president from 2003 to 2007) and then in the early months of Cristina’s first term. Like the Kirchners, Fernández belongs to the Justicialist Party, the formal home of the ideologically complex Peronist movement. But he hails from the party’s moderate wing, while Kirchner is from the center-left. After leaving Kirchner’s administration, Fernández became a fierce critic of her more divisive political choices — which included extensive new taxes on the powerful agricultural sector (which in 2015 became one of Macri’s strongest support bases) and an attempt to increase political control over the judiciary.