Last night Argentina became a different country. Or perhaps what already existed and that many of us couldn’t recognize in time. I didn’t know how to recognize it in time: I used to believe in the myth of the country that was almost educated, almost helpful, almost intelligent, with a certain pride despite everything. Argentina has finally proven that it is a desperate country, because you have to be desperate to vote for a man who showed so many signs of his imbalance and his ignorance – which, moreover, so many saw as positive values. In this new country, aggressiveness, narrow-mindedness, insults and threats were seen as signs of “authenticity”. And last night, out of sheer desperation and sheer malice, this country decided to allow itself to be led by this little cartoon character who had no more resources than two or three slogans and a few shouts.
Last night Argentina became that country: a country whose supreme authority, by the decision of 14.5 million of its citizens, will be this lying, unstable, fanatical and primal man. Although it seems that even these citizens have not decided on this. The liar had already declared a few months ago that God had announced to him through his dead dog that he would become president. It happened: his triumph is the definitive proof of the existence of God and the existence of the dog and even of the existence of Javier Milei.
Mr. Milei says he is a right-wing extremist. Or he says he is an “anarcho-capitalist,” another lie: anarchism is against all forms of power, political, economic, religious, generic, racist; Capitalism is the hallow of the power of money. You can be an anarcho or a capitalist: both at the same time are impossible.
But Mr Milei did not win the elections because his program – which no one knows well and which was constantly changing – seduced millions. He won it because Argentinians had barely survived for too long and there was no hope in sight, and he managed to portray his compatriots’ hatred of the political class that led to the catastrophe. Today’s Argentina is united by one myth: that there are some very evil villains ruining it. For some some are bad, for others others are bad, but the advantage of the myth of evil is that it excludes any personal guilt. 45 million people feel plundered and cheated by a few thousand, and it does not occur to them to think that perhaps they bear some responsibility for all this; It’s easier to blame these politicians – those who elected them, of course.
In the country where the vast majority wanted to vote against it, no one seemed more opposed than Mr Milei. Mr. Milei has managed to become a symbol of hate. For much of his campaign, his proposal was simple: We have to break everything, we have to break everything, we have to break everything, we have to break everything – and I’m the one who can do it because I’m the most violent. the king of the jungle, the lion, as he called himself. And so many followed him, followers of the chainsaw, even though the majority were unaware of what this king would do to alleviate their suffering.
(Mr. Milei represents the continuity of a line that has already lasted decades. Without ideas, without debate, without a future, Argentina became a reactionary country: a country in which each government causes so many disasters that the next takes power, against The Alfonsín government came to reverse the murderous conspiracy of the dictatorship; the Menem government to reverse the economic chaos of Alfonsinist hyperinflation; the de la Rúa government to reverse the Menemist corruption ; the Kirchner government to reverse the anti-state neoliberal catastrophe; Macri’s government to reverse the corrupt clientelism of Kirchnerism; Fernández to reverse Macri’s poverty, and now Mileis to reverse the Peronist misery, and all others and, since it concerns the state. The problem of each of these points Governments arise when this short reaction period expires: when they start to apply their own recipes, they prepare the next reaction with their disasters. A reactionary country is a country without a project, created by slaps and destroyed by slaps, a merry-go-round country.)
We don’t know much about Mr. Milei. Despite all the testing, we don’t know who he is, what he wants, and what’s more, he’s constantly changing it. In these final weeks, he devoted himself to contradicting almost everything he had said in recent months – what got him there – in order to moderate himself and seduce voters from good families who feared his excesses. He then denied that he wanted to end public education, public health, public service subsidies, the Argentine peso, the central bank, abortion, sex education, labor rights, and so many other things. And after a long campaign based on the condemnation of caste, he finally allied himself with the most rancid among them. Either he lied before, or he is lying now, as he did in his victory speech in which he repeated his most classic lies. That Argentina was the “first world power at the end of the 19th century”: It never was. The fact that he is now in 130th place in the economic rankings, so around 40th place. And that with him the country will be a power again: He repeats it ad nauseam, even though, as he says, it will take 35 years to get there is. Certainly few remember that the last government to carry this slogan – “Argentina Potencia” – was that of Isabel Perón and José López Rega (1974-76), with a sad memory and a violent end. I hope someone tells him.
In any case, the Mr. President will be. With such a mutated and deceitful character, it is very difficult to predict anything. The most solid thing he has is his fanaticism: he is a market fundamentalist, someone who believes that human relationships should be governed by buying and selling, and so he thinks that as long as there is one buyer and one, it is fine Sellers, you should act. Human organs, children, weapons. This is how his vision of the world can be summarized: Relationships between people consist of buying and selling. This means that someone wins what someone else loses, that a society is this jungle in which the strongest gain advantages and the rest try to survive. It is the antithesis of any idea of solidarity, of creating a common space where we all work together to live the way we deserve. It is the most extreme individualism under the pretext that the state is an instrument used by politicians to rob us. This is all too often the case: then it is appropriate to heal it, because unfortunately it is the only way we know to alleviate imbalances and support those who need it most. The fundamentalist, on the other hand, proposes to destroy it: to eliminate all interference in the affairs of those who do business.
But no one knows what he will do. Mr. Milei has executive power and nothing more: very few deputies, no governor. Because he doesn’t have one, he has no idea how a government is run. He made it very clear: not the slightest idea. Now the only hope is that Mr. Milei, as a good Argentine politician, does not deliver on everything he promised during the election campaign.
Mr. Milei has no idea, but he has a mission, an apostolate: he is a fanatic who must learn to contain his outbursts. The paradox is cruel: now that he has gained all this power, he must suppress himself. He’s already started doing it during the campaign, and he’ll have to do it even more when he’s president. Roughly speaking, he has two options for the future: if he does anything he promised, millions of people, Peronism, the unions and the unemployed will take to the streets to prevent it, and then he will have to resort to it the repression he is preparing. His Vice President Victoria Villarruel, daughter and niece and granddaughter of more or less murderous soldiers, when she announced that her government – which only speaks of a “reduction of the state” – will triple the military budget.
The other possibility is that he does nothing or almost nothing of what he said he would do, that he runs into the walls of his office, that he disintegrates, and then his disillusioned voters start reproaching him, taking him to task to pull, to let him down little by little.
In both options, there is, despite everything, an optimistic vision: that the very likely failure of Mr. Milei opens the space for the great dissatisfaction, the great anger, to finally unite in a more or less left-wing critical force that offers itself more supportive, fairer and more real mechanisms to channel them. In other words, reclaim the space that Milei unexpectedly and desperately occupied in the collective imagination and fill it with proposals that seek to resolve these needs, this desperation – rather than the delusions of a defender of those who cause them and benefit from them.
Javier Milei highlighted a pervasive gap in Argentine politics: the one represented by the millions of people who neither want nor can live in this country and are willing to do anything to change it, including voting for a delusional one Person. The terrible thing isn’t that Milei won; The terrible thing is that Milei has become an expression of rejection of this failed structure. But it seems clear that many of his voters do not want the society he proposes with the law of the jungle as a central norm. There may be a space there to seek other encounters.
I hope they make it, but who knows. I’m probably wrong, as is so often the case: after all, I’m talking about the country I knew, and not about the one that wanted to enthrone a Thunderer. Still, I believe these are the most turbulent times that a nation that specializes in turbulent times has ever experienced. I hope they’re not too violent, too harmful. It is now not easy to ensure this through Milei.
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