And the day came when a president of Argentina told the citizens the truth. That there is no more money, that lean times are coming, that we are bankrupt and that there will be more poor people, that the educational and social situation is dramatic, and that what is coming could be even worse. And the most notable thing? She garnered applause. It remains to be seen if this first support lasts over time. And how much of what he wants to do will be able to do.
Javier Milei took over as head of a bankrupt country that, as he recalled in his inaugural speech, faces a “critical” situation, with inflation of 300% annually that can skyrocket to 15,000% annually, with almost 50% of Argentines below the poverty line, which can reach 90%, and without access to external credit, so the only thing left to do is resort to shock. There will be adjustment and it will be hard, he said, although he promised that “almost” everything will fall on the public sector. It remains to be seen how that “almost” will be expressed.
“It is the last drink to begin the reconstruction of Argentina,” he promised in the speech he gave from the steps of Congress, facing the population and with his back to the political class, who, gathered in the legislative assembly, had taken the oath and handed over the command attributes: the presidential sash and staff, with a lion – a libertarian symbol – chiseled into the handle.
Thus begins a change of era, portrayed in multiple images throughout the day. With the now outgoing vice president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, she went from garnering 54% of the votes in 2011 and promising that they would go “for everything” to raising the middle finger of her right hand to those who insulted her. Or Milei, approaching to shake hands with the senior officers of the Armed and Security Forces who for years and years were reviled. Or Milei himself, invoking in his speech the former president of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Julio Roca, reviled by the revisionists, and garnering applause.
Of course, now no one can claim that the new president deceived them. He won the elections wielding a chainsaw as an icon of the brutal cuts in public spending that he promised. And in his inaugural speech he reaffirmed that “there is no money”, that we will face between 18 and 24 very hard months of stagflation, that whoever blocks a street will not receive a social plan and that the permissive “go on, go” for crime is over. and much more.
What response did you get? Depends. In the square, songs of support. “Chainsaw, chainsaw!” they celebrated when he peeled off cuttings; “Police, police!”, when he drew limits on social protest and rescued the work of the security forces. But those politicians from all the spaces to whom he refused to speak in the legislative assembly are preparing for a “resistance with endurance”, an “opposition timer” and a “law by law, article by article” negotiation.
Therefore, from now on and throughout his entire four-year term, Milei will struggle between his desires and his possibilities. Without enough legislators in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, and without governors of her own, she will have to move with great cunning to promote the great reform of the State that she considers unavoidable to get Argentina out of the decadence that she considers has been going on for 100 years. But he runs the risk of remaining in the declamation of the diagnosis, in voluntarism.
Milei will depend on his talent and his collaborators to forge permanent or temporary alliances in Congress that allow him to approve certain laws, or to obtain the approval of the courts each time he resorts to decrees of necessity and urgency. But, above all, it will depend on the patience and resilience – a word that he highlighted in his speech – of the Argentines to face a crisis that, he warned, could be terminal. And much will depend on him, on his ability to give society a perspective for the future, a hope, an ideal.
“No government received a worse inheritance than us,” said Milei, who recalled two black pages of national history in his speech. The first, the “rodrigazo”, due to the adjustment plan announced in 1975 by the then Minister of Economy, Celestino Rodrigo, which multiplied some economic variables by six. The second? The hyperinflation of Raúl Alfonsín.
Surrounded by the King of Spain, the president of Ukraine, Volodímir Zelenski, and the former president of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro, among other guests, the libertarian economist who just two years ago arrived in Congress with a squalid force and won the November runoff with the 55% of the votes ranged between the atrocious diagnosis and the promise of something better. He stated that “there is light at the end of the road” and that “it will be difficult, but we are going to achieve it,” calling on Argentines “to stand up, we are going to get out.”
Thus, a new stage begins in Argentina, which enters uncertain terrain. They will be turbulent times, which could mark a turning point and turn Milei into one of the great presidents of Argentina, who can be counted on the fingers of one hand… or plunge him into ostracism, where the vast majority of those who occupied the office ended up. same office in the Casa Rosada.
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