Javier Milei looked in the mirror and found for the first time in his life the mark of the passage of time on his disheveled hair, which many Argentines confused it with a wig grotesque when it burst onto television talk shows in 2016. capitalist anarcho He noticed his first gray hair at the age of 54 and he has attributed it to the frenzy of a presidential administration that marks its first 12 months on December 10. In just a few years It went from being a media extravaganza to a phenomenon that baffled everyone and everyone.. Milei is the product of the breakdown in emotions that the pandemic had caused and a political construction supported by social networks. His rise would not have been possible without the enormous frustration of society with respect to traditional leadership..
He won the second round decisively and took over on sunny Sunday as promoter of a social political laboratory. His first speech was given with his back to Congress, considering it the nest of the “political caste” who, he said, came to pulverize for being “corrupt.” Many thought that he would not last a quarter in power due to the draconian adjustment and the 118% devaluation of the national currency, the peso. Then they predicted its agony for the middle of the year as a result of the recession. Milei went through the storms, advanced in the new institutional and economic design with laws of enormous privatizing and neoliberal significance. Control citizen unrest in the streets. Take center stage along with his sister Karinaa former baker who has become the most powerful woman in the country despite notable difficulties in articulating concepts in public.
With just 30 deputies and a handful of senators, it has taken over Congress. Presidential power would have been liquefied without the invaluable help of representatives of the “caste” that he says so much to abhor and saved his fundamental decrees from shipwreck. One of them, Senator Edgardo Kueider, has just been arrested in Paraguay, where he entered without warning with $200,000 hidden. Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner assured that it was part of the money she received to disobey Peronism and vote favorably for the laws proposed by the Government.
Promises and figures
Friends and enemies recognize in Milei that he tries to fulfill what he had promised during his electoral campaign: opening of the economy, a destruction of the statesymbolized in the “chainsaw”, the reduction at any price of the fiscal deficit and control of the inflationary escalation, without measuring its social costs. Some 38,000 public employees were laid off. The private sector has lost 130,000 jobs due to the closure of companies.
Milei had predicted the dollarization of the economy. It has remained halfway for now: the North American currency has fallen to the levels of the 1990s of the last century, when there was an artificial parity between the peso and the dollar that after almost a decade collapsed due to lack of financing. Argentina is more expensive than many European countries and that is why 30% fewer foreign tourists land in Buenos Aires. On the other hand, trips abroad increased by 42.8%. Part of the middle class and the wealthiest feel happy about these benefits. Specialists predict that this country has once again stepped on the same rock of the cheap dollar for the third time, something that had happened during the last dictatorship and the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989-99). At the moment they do not dare to predict the moment of the collapse of a scheme that favors financial speculation.
The economy will fall four points this year. Poverty plagues 50% of the population. It rose almost 10 points since the extreme right ruled. Indigence is 12.3%. A third of children go to sleep without dinner. Consumption has collapsed and it will take at least two years to return to 2022 levels. Salary was reduced by 28.4% in real terms and it is around half if compared to 2015, according to the latest report from the Research and Training Center of the Argentine Republic (CIFRA). Under another government, and for less dire reasons, Argentina exploded. The fuse has not been lit and this collective acceptance of the painful circumstances is one of the enigmas that analysts and pollsters cannot decipher. In fact, the polls smile at Milei, who has the approval of 52% of citizens, largely due to the implementation of a pillar of his program: December 2023 had concluded with an increase in the cost of living of 25 %. Eleven months later it is less than three points. The first year of management will conclude with an inflation of approximately 120%. For the authorities, it is a triumph in the medium term if the decreasing trend is seen.
Profanity and intolerance
Milei hates the press, culture, universities and science without restraint. He is rude when speaking. He does not hide his homophobia. He despises environmentalists and, in particular, the left. They are all “left-handed” in their eyes, despite his moderate credentials. None of these reasons impact the weighting of his figure these days.. Visceral anti-communism has not prevented La Libertad Avanza, the ruling party, from invoking, on the eve of the first anniversary, none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.” The “revolution” now has the sign of the extreme right.
In a few months, the extertulian has devoured the traditional right embodied by the magnate Mauricio Macri, who believed that he would be the “lion” tamer. He governs with his sister and an enigmatic thirty-something advisor, Santiago Caputo, possessed of cunning and the ability to discipline legislators and businessmen who began to fear him. Together they form a kind of iron triangle. Milei does not have a strong opposition in front of him: Peronism has fragmentedthe same as the union leadership, which does not want to challenge a president blessed in the polls.
international character
One of the most surprising features of the first year of the Milei era is its impact beyond Argentine borders. He has left his mark on every platform: first in Davos, in front of the great lords of the global economy, then in the ultra-conservative forums, which have earned him diplomatic friction with Spain and Brazil. The arrival of Donald Trump to the White House prompts him to redouble his international prominence. He wants to be the great interlocutor in the region of the billionaire and Elon Musk.
Mila’s He cares about being looked at and being talked aboutalthough the texts do not favor it, as when it happened when he was on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine. It just happened again with ‘The New Yorker’. The profile written by John Lee Andersonthe biographer of Ernesto Che Guevara is shocking in some parts. He presents him as a “libertarian economist given to outrageous provocations”, someone who is “flamboyant and erratic” and claims to communicate telepathically with his dead dog. The title of the article is eloquent “The other MAGA president”alluding to the Trumpist acronym Make America Great Again. Anderson sees in Milei a new incarnation of Alex, the sociopath who stars in ‘A Clockwork Orange’the Anthony Burgess novel that Stanley Kubrick made into a film in the late 1960s. When she interviewed him, his stylist, the flat-earther deputy Lilia Lemoine, rearranged his hair again and again. “She wants it to be a mix between Elvis Presley and Wolverine.”
What caught Anderson’s attention the most is the lack of interest in the big losers of his administration. ““Not once did he express sympathy for the pensioners, nor did he even recognize them as people.” Pensions have deteriorated because the fiscal balance is sustained by its pruning. Grandfathers and grandmothers go out into the street to ask for compensation and receive canes from the Police. An elderly man tried to set himself on fire at a pensioner’s mutual headquarters in the province of Córdoba as a sign of protest. He doused himself with kerosene, but was stopped before lighting a match. He said he has cancer and cannot pay for the medications that have lost their historic free status. Again and again he shouted that he was not crazy. That is precisely the nickname that the president who no one expected has earned and now aspires to stay in power for many years.
