Pedro González
Journalist
Although he won the PASO (Open, Simultaneous and Compulsory Primary Elections) against the odds, it is unlikely that the anarcho-liberal – as he defines himself – Javier Milei will end up occupying the Casa Rosada after the real elections on 22 October. It is worth noting, however, that he has already caused a real political earthquake in Argentina, which is likely to spread to other Latin American countries where the advance of left-wing populism seemed unstoppable.
“I did not come to lead the lambs but to wake up the lions, to kick out of power the caste that parasitizes the country”, proclaimed a euphoric Milei in his heated rallies and radio and television appearances. He ended up convincing more than 30% of the electorate, who gave him a victory that was the fruit of “bronca”, that mixture of rage and discontent that the country has been dragging along since Peronism took over the vast majority of the levers of power.
Since the 40s of the last century, this Argentine version of collectivism has taken Argentina from being one of the ten great economic powers of the world to plunging it into the depths of misery. An immense and practically unpayable debt with the IMF, 40% of the population below the poverty line, a permanent galloping inflation, which this year exceeds 115%, and a dramatic decline in public services, especially health and education, make up the dramatic picture of a country, barely relieved by the spark of collective pride of a World Cup football championship with its national icon, Leonel Messi, at its head.
This Peronism, renamed Kirchnerism, embodied in the candidacy of the Minister of Economy Sergio Massa, came third in these elections (27%), which goes to show that, despite the disaster, the institutions are well infiltrated and managed by the “caste”, especially by the so-called “descamisados” of the trade unions and piqueteros, especially those of the very powerful CGT, and by the Cámpora, the political-civic-mafioso organisation, in charge of convincing, dissuading or intimidating those who refuse to recognise the achievements and benefits of the Peronist state-providence, generous in subsidies aimed at keeping the maximum possible number of “lambs” in levels of poverty that make them forever dependent on power.
The virulent discourse of Javier Milei, in fact the only one of the candidates who has presented a project for the country, has come to demonstrate that the alleged assault on the skies is not the exclusive dialectical monopoly of the extreme left.
His proposal to minimise the elephantine size and power of the state; to drastically cut the enormous size of public employment while creating the conditions to favour free enterprise and the creation of private employment; to crack down hard on delinquency and especially organised crime; liberalising the arms trade and the sale of organs; repealing the current abortion law; vetoing LGTBIQ+ indoctrination in the classroom; re-establishing legal security and even closing the Central Bank and dollarising the economy, has shaken the foundations of the system.
As former Uruguayan president Julio María Sanguinetti says, “such a programme is very difficult to implement, except under revolutionary conditions”.
This is perhaps why, although the economist Javier Milei describes himself as a staunch supporter of the free market, he greeted his victory in the primaries with a further collapse of Argentina’s battered finances: a 22% devaluation of the peso and a hike in the Central Bank’s monetary policy rate to 118%.
Such a disruptive discourse is so radical that in the October elections it will probably fail to prevail, and instead give way to the former Macrista minister Patricia Bullrich, also in favour of the “iron fist” but without destroying the system, as promised by Milei, who has immediately been dubbed an ultra-right-winger in all the latitudes that sympathise with the Puebla Group or the Sao Paulo Forum.
But it is precisely Milei’s programme, the winner of these primaries, that could awaken the whole continent to the advance of social-communism, be it Castro-Chavism, Peronism-Kirchnerism or even Sandinism-Ortegaism, all with the surname “revolution” as their supposedly cynical common denominator.
Milei is not a star out of orbit. We have already begun to see glimmers of this counter-offensive in Chile, where Gabriel Boric has had to back down; in Colombia, whose president Gustavo Petro may be prosecuted, as well as judicially, by Parliament for theft, money laundering and electoral fraud according to the revelations of his own son; in Peru, whose president and parliament are still resisting the aftermath of Pedro Castillo’s failed self-coup; and even in Mexico, where President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has been answered by an indigenous woman and successful businesswoman, Xóchitl Gálvez, who dismantles AMLO’s morning homilies every day. With her soft-spoken but obsidian-sharp tongue, the opposition candidate for the 2024 presidential elections accuses López Obrador of having increased the number of Mexicans living in poverty by 30 million with his policies, of having achieved the highest number of murders and disappearances in the country’s history during his term in office, and of not having prevented 80 per cent of Mexico’s territory from being in the hands of organised crime. The president, who has designated Claudia Sheinbaum as his candidate to succeed him in the National Palace, tries to pass her off as a woman of the left in front of Xóchitl, who limits herself to smiling sarcastically, replying that she was already helping her family as a street vendor at the age of nine to pay her way through school, the same age at which Sheinbaum received exclusive ballet classes.
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