Potential "tear it all down" president scares Argentina
Argentina's next president will have monumental tasks to solve. The state is almost bankrupt, inflation and poverty rates are high. The plans of the libertarian candidate Javier Milei awaken ghosts of the past - in the truest sense of the word.
Argentina is balancing on a cliff and the self-proclaimed savior, who wants to pull the country back onto safe ground by force, is almost furious. "Could we stop muttering behind the cameras?" Javier Milei interrupts his TV interview with a journalist angrily. The libertarian presidential candidate gesticulates nervously: "If I make a mistake, they'll destroy me in public and no one will say it was because of the mumbling." But the pressure on Milei is enormous.
The economist is a professional and has been on Argentinian TV for years. On Sunday, however, he is running as the head of the "La Libertad Avanza" ("Freedom Advances") party in the decisive run-off election against Peronist Economy Minister Sergio Massa. The two are virtually tied in the polls. Many assume that Milei has a slight advantage. However, Milei was also considered the favorite in the first round of voting - and Massa trumped the upstart. Milei has been in politics for three years. Massa has been for three decades. Among other things, the minister had arranged for special payments to those on low incomes and warned of immense price increases if Milei won. That obviously worked.
The 53-year-old Milei, sometimes in a leather jacket, sometimes in a suit, always with his iconic hairstyle, was paraded around the television studios as an economic expert until 2020; because he shouted and swore and expressed his anger at "those up there", the "shitty leftists", "Marxists" and the Peronist government in front of the cameras. He also presented his dogs in front of the camera, appeared at a cosplay event singing in a self-designed "General Anarcho-Capitalist" costume and talked about his time as a tantra sex teacher. In the meantime, however, Milei has become much more than just a shouter and quota-bringer who, according to his own statement, hates the state. He has become a political outlet for dissatisfaction in the economic crisis that has been going on for years, especially among younger Argentinians.
"The caste is afraid", with this campaign slogan sung to a soccer tune, the pampa populist and his supporters have made it to just outside the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada. The caste, that is the elite of politicians and entrepreneurs, and he, the fresh-faced outsider, wants to drive them out and usher in a golden future without inflation with radical, magical recipes. Monetary devaluation, currently at over 140 percent, is the most important topic of the elections. To this end, Milei describes the national currency as "excrement", which he wants to replace with the US dollar and abolish the central bank, although no one can clearly explain how this would work.
Argentina is juggling with everything it has in order not to go bankrupt. If Milei wins, confidence in the peso would in all likelihood collapse and inflation would explode. It already stands at over 140 percent. The central bank has virtually no foreign currency, but the national budget is burdened by the highest loan (in dollars) in the history of the International Monetary Fund and its austerity requirements.
Animal advisors and God's mission
This is not the only reason why Milei is highly controversial. Some simply think he is crazy. According to the unauthorized biography "El Loco", Milei has had hard times. In his childhood, the presidential candidate was regularly beaten to death by his father, at school he was a bullied outsider - hence his nickname "El Loco" - and later he considered his dog Conan to be his son. When the English mastiff dies in 2017, Milei is soon talking to its spirit with the help of a medium, an "anarcho-capitalist sorcerer". In an interview, the sorcerer says of himself and Milei that both were "very important people in the Roman Empire" and therefore "very used to fighting".
A friend sets up a profile of the deceased dog on social media, to which Milei sends love messages. The economist has Conan cloned in the USA - he names his "grandchildren" after liberal economists: Milton (Friedman), Murray (Rothbard), Robert (Lucas) and Conan again, because he behaved like his genetic father. Milei and his sister Karina, who pulls all the strings in the background, are trained in telepathy so that they can communicate with dead and living dogs. According to the author of the biography, the Great Danes who live with him in the center of the capital are like a shadow cabinet: each one advises him on a different topic.
But something else happened to Milei after Conan's death, according to people close to him: he began to see ghosts. And talking to them. In a bookshop in Buenos Aires, he talked to the libertarian icon Ayn Rand (who died more than 40 years ago). According to the report, he repeatedly talks to Murray Rothbard (who died almost 29 years ago), like Milei himself a follower of the economic libertarian Austrian school. In 2020, during the pandemic, God visits him. "He told me that I had a mission," he said about these meetings, according to acquaintances: He was to become president in 2023.
In 2021, Milei founded his party, which allied itself with the Evangelicals. Caps with the inscription "The Powers of Heaven" are ubiquitous at election rallies. At the same time, however, they are extremely critical of Pope Francis, an Argentinian who is closer to the Peronists. Milei describes himself as Catholic, but called the Pope an "idiot" and "representative of evil on earth" in 2020 because he is in favor of taxes. During the current election campaign, he told US presenter Tucker Carlson that the Pope is a friend of "killing communists" and violates the Ten Commandments because he supports social justice. When Milei surprisingly won the primaries in Argentina in August, he thanked his dogs, calling them "the best strategists in the world".
Enormous loss of purchasing power
For South America's second-largest economy, both the short-term and the long-term future are at stake in the election. The short-term, because wage adjustments are not keeping pace with inflation. The poverty rate is over 40 percent, as high as during the pandemic. The low-income population in particular is suffering from the loss of purchasing power. Around half of them have been left behind economically in recent years. They are being kept afloat by state social programs and numerous subsidies. If they vote for the libertarian, they could be sawing at the branch they are holding on to. During the election campaign, Milei repeatedly let a chainsaw howl - symbolic of how he wants to tackle state spending.
No one can predict where the case will end. This means that the medium and long-term future is also at stake. Argentina wants to become a global energy exporter. Northern Patagonia is home to one of the largest shale oil and gas deposits in the world, the country has gigantic expanses for wind turbines, and the northern Andes Cordillera holds one of the largest known lithium deposits, currently indispensable for the Global North's transition to electromobility. Exploitation has already begun. Ideally, value creation through battery production will be added. How will future governments use these treasures?
Milei doesn't talk much about that. Instead, he loses himself in hateful tirades, economic trivia, glorifies Argentina's past and draws unhelpful comparisons with the USA or Germany. It is enough to associate the economist John Maynard Keynes with him for him to fly into a rage: the libertarian then rails against the "communists" or calls the economist's work "inconsistent garbage". As a follower of the Austrian school, which teaches radical individualism and market autonomy, his heroes are others. "The state is the pedophile in the kindergarten, with the little ones chained up and bathed in Vaseline," said Milei. Such comparisons are not uncommon.
This absolute aversion to the state sometimes gets in his own way. The televised debate before the run-off election, when almost half of Argentinians were watching, turned into a media disaster for Milei. The anarcho-capitalist was pushed in front of him by Massa, who was partly responsible for the economic crisis: Did Milei want to abolish public education and the healthcare system? Abolish workers' rights? Privatize the pension system? End trade relations with China and Brazil? And above all: abolish subsidies so that prices explode?
He had repeatedly announced many of these plans in crystal clear terms - only to claim the opposite after the result of the first round of voting. This was because the Libertarian had missed out on the victory he had hoped for in the first round of voting and had allied himself with the conservatives - whose candidate Patricia Bullrich only came third - and above all with former President Mauricio Macri. The bourgeois alliance then imploded, as quite a few voters were faced with a dilemma: after all, it was the super-rich who had triggered the current crisis in 2018 with liberal economic measures. Bullrich was security minister in Macri's government. Some politicians and voters then defected to Milei, others to Massa.
Who is afraid of whom?
Milei was therefore on the defensive in the TV debate. He lurched along, tried to defend himself with aggressive tirades instead of comprehensible arguments, revealed gaps in his knowledge and made mistakes in terms of content and strategy. He also made wild gestures, confused looks and showed his teeth in anger. While his opponent publicly dismantled himself, Massa repeatedly looked pityingly into the cameras. He probably already sensed the almost unanimous verdict of the Argentinian media, regardless of political affiliation: Milei had lost the debate.
However, most of his voters say they are voting for the libertarian because of his authenticity and out of hope for a better future. Massa's voters, on the other hand, would opt for a familiar face. They also have in mind the collapse of the state and economy in 2001 and 2002, triggered by a peso pegged to the dollar, liberal economic measures and privatization, Milei's recipes. Billions of dollars in private assets were destroyed. Milei is also against abortions and his vice-president trivializes the atrocities of the last military dictatorship.
And so the two candidates are dividing the electorate. In the end, the Argentines will give the answer to what their society is more afraid of: Milei's unpredictability and a joint leap off the cliff? Or of the current economy minister, who wants to continue balancing along the cliff at the risk of a fatal misstep?
Argentina is located in South America, and Javier Milei, a controversial presidential candidate, hails from this country. In his aims to revitalize the economy, Milei draws inspiration from Argentina's past, much to the dismay of some who see these recalled policies as a return to economic instability.
Source: www.ntv.de
