Argentina’s not ready for Javier Milei’s ‘very radical, untested economic ideas’, says Dr Christopher Sabatini, the Senior Research Fellow for Latin America at the foreign affairs think tank, Chatham House. While other observers insist that time is ripe for an alternative to the corrupt clientelism of Peronism.
For many of those who voted for Milei, however, the specifics of the policies were less important than the message: one that the president-elect amplified in his victory speech on Sunday night, declaring that ‘we are at the end of the caste model’ of politics, Sabatini notes (below):
It’s also uncertain how far Milei’s undoubted popular mandate will grant him the power to transform the country. Argentina’s system of clientelism runs deep, and it’s not clear that Milei’s party can forge the necessary alliances to dominate the country’s federal system to pass and implement his radical remake of the country’s economy and politics.
As an antisystem candidate and now president-elect, Milei is not a singular phenomenon in Latin America, according to Tulane University’s Virginia Oliveros and Emilia Simison. Dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy was key to catapulting Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.
Milei, however, has significantly less political experience than either of them, and his proposals are a more radical break from the past than what even most political outsiders propose, they write for the Journal of Democracy. At the end of the day, both Milei’s unusual victory and his prospects for political survival may be linked to the most typical explanation of electoral outcomes in Latin America: the economic situation in general and inflation in particular. If he fails to improve the country’s economic prospects, one big question will remain: what will Milei do next?
#Argentina‘s @JMilei is not a singular phenomenon in Latin America. Dissatisfaction with democracy’s functioning was key to catapulting Bolsonaro in Brazil and Bukele in El Salvador, @Tulane‘s #VirginiaOliveros & #EmiliaSimison write @JoDemocracy. https://t.co/cpp1nFFgrQ
— Democracy Digest (@demdigest) November 22, 2023
“Milei will take office as the weakest president in Argentina’s history, despite his clear victory in the second round,” political analyst and consultant Sergio Berensztein told the Financial Times. “The first question for governability will be the system of alliances and pacts which Milei will construct.”
Such relationships will require Milei to take a more moderated stance than his election rhetoric suggests since he will require legislative and gubernatorial partners to govern, say observers. Furthermore, the size of his majority reflects the degree of popular discontent with the government and antipathy towards entrenched Peronist mismanagement and corruption.
By triumphing over the ruling Union for the Homeland party’s candidate, Milei’s victory has dealt a major blow to the powerful Peronist movement that has long been influential in the country, Foreign Policy adds. When he takes office on Dec. 10, one of his biggest challenges will be taking charge of an economy in free fall: More than 40 percent of Argentines are living in poverty, while inflation has soared to 143 percent.
More concerning, Milei appears to embrace apologia for the country’s most recent military dictatorship, which governed between 1976 and 1983 and was responsible for a hideous Dirty War that saw up to 30,000 people, primarily leftist political opponents, disappeared and killed, The Post reports:
He reviles the legacy of the late Raul Alfonsin, Argentina’s first democratically elected leader after that period of dictatorship, whose effigy Milei once said he uses as a punching bag. Milei’s running mate, Victoria Villarruel, is a lawyer who has campaigned on defending the record of the military dictatorship, and who wants to end ongoing prosecution of military personnel involved in the Dirty War and suspend the state pension program that was implemented to support families of its victims. Milei’s victory, in a sense, is an affirmation of this revisionist vision.
“It used to be toxic for politicians in Argentina to deny the dictatorial past,” Argentine historian Federico Finchelstein told The Post. But the current moment “shows that Argentine political culture regarding dictatorship and the past has degraded significantly,” he added, gesturing to the animus also on show among Trump and Bolsonaro supporters. “This cannot be good for the democratic future.” Such nostalgia “in both the U.S. and Brazil also led to coups,” he said.
Argentina’s chief democratic success has been “the forging of a broad societal consensus against military intervention and in defense of human rights. I worry that great achievement is now being threatened,” said Harvard University’s Steven Levitsky, a Journal of Democracy contributor.
The presidents of Chile and Colombia overestimated their mandates. #Argentina’s next leader #Milei2023 can avoid a similar path, @patricionavia writes for @AmerQuarterly. https://t.co/J0joc7NN3c
— Democracy Digest (@demdigest) November 22, 2023
On the other hand…
Given recent election victories for the Peronists’ hard leftist allies in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and other countries, today’s election in Argentina can be seen as a referendum on the future of Latin America itself. This makes Milei’s win even more significant, analysts suggest.
Milei is steeped in neoliberal economics, as he displays in a three-hour interview with The Economist:
He wants to privatise all the sclerotic state companies, dollarise the economy and reduce the country’s deficit to zero in his first year. His political and economic models, he says, are Australia, Israel, Ireland and New Zealand. For years talk of free-market capitalism has been a guaranteed vote-loser in bloated, statist Argentina. Past attempts to liberalise have all faltered.
Yet if Mr Milei wins the election next month the country could, in theory, become again a laboratory for exciting, dynamism-promoting ideas, the paper adds.
