This Sunday, Javier Gerardo Milei will take office as president of Argentina. This 53-year-old liberal libertarian economist, who became known as a right-wing provocateur who shouted and insulted on television, mutated as the election campaign progressed into a professor-like politician who denied much of what he had said before. After winning the elections, he continued the transformation and emerged as a more pragmatic leader than he appeared, willing to forge alliances with everyone, until creating a small cabinet. Frankenstein: It will have ministers with no experience in public management, with Macristas and even Peronists.
Under all those layers of onion, the essential Milei remains, the one that keeps intact the objective for which it entered politics: dismantling the battered Argentine welfare state in pursuit of absolute primacy of the market. What has changed are the ways, the deadlines and the main actors with which the radical transformation of Argentina is sought. He wants it to be as quick as possible, but given the parliamentary weakness of his party, La Libertad Avanza, he will have to negotiate every step he takes.
Milei begins his mandate with the legitimacy of more than 14 million votes, 55.6% of those who went to the polls in the second round against the Peronist Sergio Massa. “The presidency is the most important party in Argentina, especially at the beginning,” says sociologist Pablo Semán. In his opinion, Milei will also have a window of opportunity until the opposition reorganizes. The alliance with the hard wing of Together for Change blew up the coalition founded in 2015 by Mauricio Macri and Peronism is disconcerted. “The ruling party, which now becomes the opposition, is not only electorally defeated, but is surprised by the defeat, demoralized and has lost its word,” he adds.
“Milei is a person who has shown a political skill that no one is willing to recognize and I believe that he combines a certain degree of inflexibility in his strategic objectives, which is the largest possible market, with tactics that seek to accumulate forces to achieve those objectives. “She defines alliances that seem contradictory, but that do not surprise me because they are typical of any political leader who seeks to accumulate forces,” says this sociologist, author of the book It is between us. Where does the extreme right that we did not see coming come from and how far can it go?. Political scientist Valeria Brusco agrees with him: “I thought that [Milei] He wasn’t going to make it because it seemed like he didn’t have the necessary social and emotional skills, so I was surprised by his political ability.”
Many of Milei’s voters were enthusiastic about his populist promises: eliminate the privileges of the “political caste,” fire inefficient state workers, exterminate inflation, apply a tough line against criminals and corrupt people, and reactivate the economy with fewer taxes and more Labor flexibility. Others, even with doubts, voted for him to remove Kirchnerism from power, which has governed 16 of the last 20 years.
The leader of La Libertad Avanza has begun to qualify his promises before taking office. He will reduce inflation, he says, but it will take at least two years to get it under control. He will lower taxes, but first we must stabilize an economy that is dying. Until then, strong turbulence is coming: Argentina needs a fiscal adjustment and the large cut in public spending that is coming will contract economic activity and increase unemployment. In parallel, the lifting of exchange restrictions and the withdrawal of subsidies for public transportation and gas, light and electricity rates will trigger inflation above the current 142%. His voters seem willing to make the sacrifices at the cost of further reducing meager family budgets. What is not known is for how long.
“I think as an analogy of a cancer patient,” says political scientist Celia Kleiman. “If they tell him that he can be cured through surgery, he accepts even if it is bloody and requires a tough postoperative period. The sacrifice for many is not new, because they have been sacrificing for a decade and they think that now it is something different and then their salary is enough to buy barbecue, which for many today is complicated, or to think about a car or a department,” he adds.
symbolic gesture
Milei will be sworn in before the Legislative Assembly this Sunday and will then break tradition: instead of speaking before the legislators, he will give a speech on the esplanade in front of Congress Square. It is a populist gesture with great symbolic weight: he will address the people and not the “political caste.” A caste that he can reject in his message, but which forms an intrinsic part of his government.
The Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, and the Minister of Security, Patricia Bullrich, also formed part of the Cabinet of the conservative Mauricio Macri. The president of the Chamber of Deputies, Martín Menem, goes back to the nineties, when his uncle, Carlos Menem, launched a privatization plan that Milei now wants to resume with even more ambition. If he keeps his word, public works—on which nearly 400,000 workers depend—will be paralyzed and offered to the private sector. The plan is for the oil company YPF to once again pass into private hands, as well as Aerolíneas Argentinas and the public media.
“More radical than Trump”
“In Argentina we overact the changes,” underlines political scientist Sergio Morresi. “In the nineties we were neoliberal, like other countries in the region, but here we privatize things that others don’t, like the YPF oil company. In Mexico they did not privatize Pemex,” he compares. Semán agrees on the depth of the changes in Argentina and draws differences between Milei and other far-right leaders, such as the American Donald Trump and the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro. “Milei’s rise is more abrupt than Bolsonaro’s and is programmatically more radical than Trump’s and this happens in a situation of social, economic and political decomposition much greater than in the United States and Brazil and with more labile institutional limits,” Semán points out. “Although it has sexist and authoritarian components, it has a great economic component, as it does not have [el partido español] Vox,” he continues. The cultural battle will be fierce if the economic one advances more slowly than desired.
The decline of Argentina after successive political failures was key to Milei’s victory. The message of a present State increasingly clashed with a different daily life, in which families had to deal with public schools without classes, public transportation with delays and cancellations of service, frequent street closures and long lines to get a medical appointment. “Many people from the middle class and below began distancing themselves from the State,” describes Morresi, who began to glimpse years ago a shift in society to the right, led by young men, which has now been reflected in the polls.
This political scientist rules out that Milei’s voters share his agenda in its entirety, although he believes that they do coincide in part or, at least, with a personal interpretation of it. “For carrying weapons [entre los ciudadanos] many did not understand that, but rather stronger police repression; By dollarization they meant stability,” says Morresi. Milei’s attacks on the elites were also well received from the most relegated places in Argentina, where he has a feeling against the centralism of Buenos Aires.
far-right summit
On his X account, formerly Twitter, Milei appears only as an economist. On Instagram, the more than 4.5 million followers of the president-elect of Argentina, the first thing they see is advertising for courses to become a stock market operator. “Do you want to learn how to invest like a true professional? Get trained with @nwprofessionaltraders”, can be read on Milei’s profile on this social network, which acts as a reminder of the new president’s recent past.
Milei no longer swells on television while shouting at a model of the central bank. Neither does she say she is in favor of selling children or organs, nor does she insult politicians by calling them thieves, useless and parasites. She has asked for forgiveness from Pope Francis, whom she accused of being the representative of evil on Earth, and in the end she extended an invitation to the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to attend his inauguration. She changes her mind without blushing and her team acts the same: this Friday she announced in a statement that the cardiologist Mario Russo would be Secretary of Health and less than an hour later she promoted him to minister.
But rebuilding bridges is more difficult than blowing them up. Bullrich withdrew the lawsuit he had filed against her after accusing her of being a “bomb-thrower,” but Lula declined to accept an invitation that had arrived later than to Bolsonaro, who will be present at her inauguration. The investiture will be a summit of the global far-right, with the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, and the Spanish Santiago Abascal also attending.
Milei’s speech on foreign policy maintains alignment with the United States, Israel and it remains to be seen what Argentina’s position will be in a Mercosur that both Uruguay and Paraguay want to make more flexible. Although trade relations with Brazil and China, Buenos Aires’ main partners, are maintained, everything indicates that the leading role will now pass to the private sector. There is no shortage of resources: Argentina is among the countries with the largest reserves of lithium and unconventional gas in the world, in addition to being a powerful food producer.
The true face of President Milei will begin to be known this Sunday. He is preparing a large package of measures with which to start his mandate and has also anticipated that he will call extraordinary sessions in Congress. He knows that the honeymoon will be short and that he has to act before the knocked out opposition wakes up. “We must remember that we are in summer and that in summer public issues are as if they fall asleep, which is why it is often used to pass complicated legislation,” anticipates Brusco, a member of the Network of Political Scientists. He agrees that in the short term the economic situation will get much worse and there will be protests, but he believes that the popular support with which he starts removes the risk of a social outbreak.
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