“We will put an end to Kirchnerism and the parasitic political caste and bullshit that is sinking the country,” Javier Milei shouted from the stage that his group, La Libertad Avanza, had set up in a hotel in downtown Buenos Aires. Thus, the role of the only opponent was arrogated, both from the Peronist government and from the traditional right, buckled behind the figure of former president Mauricio Macri in the Together for Change coalition. Milei obtained 30% of the votes in the primary elections held this Sunday in Argentina. He surpassed the two Macrista candidates, Patricia Bullrich and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, by two points; and by three to the man who Peronism embraced as the last option before the abyss, Sergio Massa. No one saw the earthquake coming.
Milei is now the most popular politician in Argentina. What happens from this Monday is a mystery. The country plunges into an unknown dimension. Until now, he had looked with perplexity at the authoritarian drift of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador; or the electoral defeat of the Chilean Gabriel Boric at the hands of the extreme right of José Antonio Kast, nostalgic for the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Argentines now have the phenomenon at home.
There were many defeated this Sunday. The first, and most evident, the Peronist government. Sergio Massa, Minister of the Economy and candidate, fell prey to the economic catastrophe that Argentines suffer every day. Inflation exceeds 100%, poverty rises and the International Monetary Fund lurks, while the country runs out of dollars. The surprise would have been an official victory. It was not by chance that Massa crossed the desert of the campaign alone. The president, Alberto Fernández, already works as a former president, giving interviews on TikTok and settling for reaching December, when his term expires. The vice president, Cristina Kirchner, stayed as far away as possible from an election that she saw as lost.
The second defeated is the traditional right. In Together for Change they never took Milei’s bravado very seriously and always considered him a possible ally after the primaries. The votes for Liberty Advance, they thought, would go to Together for Change in the general elections. Patricia Bullrich and Rodríguez Larreta then staged an internal blood and fire fight, convinced that the winner would later secure the presidency. The couple showed the worst of politics and their traditional voters turned their backs on them. The cost has been very high: Milei is now the owner of the ball.
The ultra candidate managed to capitalize on the protest vote by shouting louder than his constituents; he promised an uncertain dollarization, the end of the state and getting politicians out “with kicks in the ass.” In his government there will be no ministries of Education, Social Development, Health or Public Works. There will be no Central Bank either and the economy will be dollarized. Milei’s libertarian utopia means the end of the State, a “rat’s nest” where politicians have been enriching themselves at the expense of others for centuries. Almost seven million Argentines, fed up with decades of economic crisis, were willing to take the risk. The anarchy that the followers of the economist imagine recovers the motto that structured the protests of the crisis of the corralito, in 2001: “Let them all go, let not one remain.” It is the liberal version of a movement that gave rise to Kirchnerism a little over 20 years ago and is now launching itself without a compass into unknown territory.
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