In Argentina there are few things as indisputable as INDEC, the public institute that offers the main economic figures. All sectors, on both sides of the parliamentary arc, respect their numbers. A quick foray into their website explains much more clearly than any political analysis why Javier Milei has traveled to Madrid to wage the “cultural battle” against “the left-handed” (for him, almost all of humanity, not just the progressives, because he includes a good part of the moderate right, the UN, the IMF and even the businessmen in Davos whom he sees devoted to socialism). And also why he called the wife of the democratic leader of the country he is visiting “corrupt,” something unprecedented in any minimal diplomatic usage.
Argentina is in a deep economic recession, which the Milei adjustment and the enormous price increase caused by its first liberalizing measures has only worsened. Inflation is 8.8% monthly, 289% annually, 65% so far this year, already with Milei at the helm. And yet he considers that 8.8% monthly increase a success because it fell compared to the previous month, in the midst of a recession and with consumption very slow. The economy is falling at 3.2% annually. The manufacturing production index is collapsing at a rate of 21% annually. Construction is falling to 42%.
Milei needs to talk about cultural battles against “socialism”, confront Sánchez, anyone who represents world progressivism, warm up the right “against the lefties” to whom nothing should be “conceded even when it seems that they are right” , as he said in Vistalegre, because his economic analysis does not withstand the slightest contrast with the data. The Argentine president maintains to great applause that socialism leads to poverty and death. But since for him socialism is everything, including practically all the governments in Europe, that would imply assuming that Europe is much worse than Milei’s Argentina or will soon be. Something difficult to defend seriously.
Argentina, furthermore, has not always been, as Milei says, in the hands of what he calls “socialists”, in reality an amalgam of Peronists where there is a lot of ideological mix, including a lot of the right. For 10 years (1989-1999) he was led by Carlos Menem, who made liberal policies that Milei likes. In fact, some of those in charge now with Milei were on Menem’s economic team. And the result was that everything ended up exploding in 2001, including the playpen. And then he had Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), who supports Milei, and ended up in an IMF bailout. And then, yes, he had the Peronists and he sank even further, and that is why Milei won the elections, in the midst of the collapse of credibility of the Government of Alberto Fernández. On the contrary, the policies that he defines as socialist, with the help of European funds, also anathema to Milei, have Spain growing at 2.4%, with record employment data, an annual inflation of 3.3% and a record industrial production with skyrocketing corporate profits.
Milei has broken all the bridges. Some point out that this is a response to the attack by Minister Óscar Puente. In fact, Milei’s spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, officially declared that crisis over after a very harsh statement in which the Argentine president said that Sánchez endangers Spanish women by opening the way to illegal immigration. It does not seem likely, then, that it is a delayed reaction to Puente. Milei already went to Davos to accuse the world’s largest capitalists of surrendering to socialism. He is a provocateur, who lives off tension, and would probably have done the same thing or something very similar without the need for Puente to talk about his drug use, something that the Government saw as a mistake and that the minister himself admitted. that if he had calculated its impact he would not have said it.
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Milei is in another dimension. She needs no help or excuse to provoke. It is her natural place, the one that has given her success, the same one that led her to say that the Argentine Pope is “the representative of evil on earth” and then, once elected, go to Rome to embrace Jorge Mario Bergoglio. There are no limits in the Milei world. It doesn’t matter if it works to generate attention and provocation, to occupy all the media space and leave the opposition missing, as all his heirs learned from the great master, Silvio Berlusconi. And yet, not even Berlusconi would have dared to do so much abroad. Sánchez, on the contrary, swallowed quina in Rome by calling “expensive Giorgia” to Meloni to try to ease the tension between the two governments at ideological opposites. And Meloni herself, brutal at the Vox rallies when she was still only a candidate, is very careful about launching herself directly against Sánchez to avoid a diplomatic crisis like this one.
Milei therefore seems delighted with this battle, despite the serious consequences in two countries that cannot afford to have a diplomatic crisis of this level with all the interrelations that cross them. Sánchez has also reacted quickly because politically Milei and the far-right conclave in Vistalegre places the framework where the president was looking for it: in a battle between the far right, with its brutal forms and its background of total rupture of the most basic consensus, and the progressive that has marked the management of the covid crisis in the EU. The most uncomfortable with the controversy seems to be the PP, which refuses to support Sánchez even when he is attacked in Spain by a foreign president – many socialists remember José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero defending José María Aznar against the attacks on Hugo Chávez in the Ibero-American summit of “why don’t you shut up” – but at the same time it does not want to enter the framework that Vox has established by bringing in Milei. The European campaign is launched. The session in Congress on Wednesday will be very relevant in this context. But be careful, nothing is neutral, and the diplomatic crisis will have profound consequences if someone in Buenos Aires does not decide to fix it.
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