Argentina has a colorful new libertarian president and the left already hates him: but Argentines who fled the economic disaster that has hit their country are now thinking of returning.
Some call Javier Milei ‘el loco’ (the crazy one) or ‘the wig’, even though his hair is real. He played in a Rolling Stones cover band in his youth and still looks good. He wore mutton chops, wore leather jackets and appeared at campaign rallies with a chainsaw, symbolic of his plans to cut spending and taxes and eliminate ten of Argentina’s eighteen ministries. .
A lifelong bachelor and the son of a businessman and housewife, he is a tantric sex guru and advocate of group sex, although he calls sex education in schools a Marxist plot to destroy the family and wants a repeat of the 2020 Argentine referendum, which legalized . abortion. He is a climate change and vaccine skeptic who has won praise from Donald Trump, who has said he will make Argentina great again, and Elon Musk. He also inspired organized protests from Taylor Swift fans, calling his compatriot Pope Francis a “shameful communist” and worse. Milei has four 200-pound English Mastiffs that he calls his four-legged children, all named after his favorite right-wing economists. They were cloned in the US from Conan, a beloved dog who died in 2017, but he claims he still advises him through a psychic.
Milei, a newcomer to politics who was elected to Congress in 2021, memorably described the Argentine government as “a pedophile in a kindergarten, with the children chained up and bathed in Vaseline.” He’s not entirely wrong. The left-wing Peronists have ruled Argentina for 16 of the past twenty years, and even in a hit on Milei, the New York Times acknowledged that their left-wing policies have “taken the country from prosperity to crisis.”
Inflation is at 143 percent, the peso has lost about 90 percent of its value against the U.S. dollar on the black market, and 40 percent of the country lives below the poverty line. It is a national shame for a proud people. At the end of the 19e For centuries, Argentina was so prosperous that the phrase “as rich as Argentina” existed, but now Argentina ranks 126th in the World Bank’s index of doing business and 94th in Transparency International’s corruption perception index, behind developing countries like Burkina Faso, Belarus, and Benin.
In April 2020, one US dollar bought 80 pesos on the semi-official, ‘dolar blue’ black market exchange. Argentina imposed two of the world’s longest and strictest lockdowns during the pandemic, and Milei has been a vocal opponent of these measures. The economy collapsed and has not recovered. When I visited in August 2022, my guide, Celeste, told us we were arriving at a “historic time of hyperinflation.” We got 330 pesos for $1 and for us Argentina was cheap. But inflation has only gotten worse since then, and one US dollar can now buy more than 900 pesos. (Note: The foreign exchange market is closed today as it is a national holiday, so we will have to wait until Tuesday to see how the election will affect the market.)
Like many other young Argentinians we met, Celeste left the country during the crisis to seek citizenship in Italy. She says the small town of 2,000 people she settled in in southern Italy had more than 200 young Argentinians, all trying to gain EU citizenship on the basis of Italian descent. With the economy in shambles, it should come as no surprise that an outsider like Milei could defeat Sergio Massa, the economy minister who oversaw left-wing policies that led to runaway inflation, which reached 56 percent 44 percent dropped. An Argentinian friend, Patricia, told me in an email that the country needed change. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a crazy option,” she said. “We are tired of inflation, injustice, corruption and prosperity.”
Apart from closing ministries, including the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, Milei has said he wants to abandon the peso in favor of the US dollar, close the central bank, relax gun laws, cut spending, wants to reduce taxes and reduce regulations. , implement a system of school choice vouchers and privatize state media, the national oil industry and others. “Today the idea that the state is a spoil to be shared among politicians and their friends comes to an end,” he said.
Milei has also taken a noticeably softer stance on the Falkland Islands than most Argentine politicians. He takes the position that the islands belong to Argentina, but that the islanders – who predominantly want to remain British – should have a say in their future. He praised Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister who launched Britain’s 1982 operation to retake the Falklands from Argentine invaders, during his campaign as one of “the great leaders in the history of humanity.” This provoked predictable criticism from his opponents and the ‘war veterans’ movement, but it did not win him the election.
It is also predictable that the liberal Western media is not interested in his freedom agenda. The BBC dismissed him as a “far-right” “radical,” on par with Trump and Brazil’s former leader Jair Bolsonaro, even though neither are libertarians. The New York Times also described his victory as a victory for the “far right” and labeled him a conspiracy theorist and Trump wannabe.
Milei shouldn’t be fired so easily, but he does have his work cut out for him. His Liberty Advances party has only seven of the 72 seats in Argentina’s Senate and 38 of the 257 in the House of Representatives. He is clearly an eccentric, but he received more than half of the votes in a country with 46 million inhabitants. So it’s fallacious to label Milei as a “far-right” extremist when the same news outlets completely fail to describe anyone, even actual communists. , far left.
While the intelligentsia in Europe and North America cackle in disapproval, many Argentinians are hopeful. Celeste says there was cheering from a WhatsApp group of Argentine exiles in Italy and Spain after Milei’s victory. She says many of these young exiles hope to return to their beloved country as Milei and his libertarian, free-market policies change the country.
“If Argentina becomes more stable and we gain more dignity, I think many will return because they didn’t want to leave Argentina in the first place,” she said.
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