There will a lot to say over the next few months about what’s going on in Argentina, but it’s a sign of the depth of the crisis that the country is now facing that in the first round of voting for this year’s presidential election, a self-described libertarian, Javier Milei, came top of the poll, with a little over 30 percent of the vote, far better than the roughly 20 percent that was expected.
Libertarianism has not, shall we say, been a major part of the Argentina’s political tradition. Milei, a former economics professor, entered Congress, where his party has just two representatives, only in 2021. In the primary, Patricia Bullrich and Horacio Rodríguez Larret of the center-right Juntos por el Cambio together took about 28 percent, and Sergio Massa, the candidate of the incumbent Peronists (he is, poor man, the current economy minister) scored 27 percent.
Marcos Falcone details some of Milei’s economic program for Capital Matters here. Quite what happens next is anyone’s guess, but economic and political crises have a way of going hand in hand, and Argentina has plenty of experience of both. Currently inflation is back over 100 percent for the first time since 1991 and is set to go higher. The peso has collapsed, and the country has around $30 billion (gross) in foreign-exchange reserves. The net number is probably minus $5 billion. That’s an unofficial number (the central bank does not provide one), but it suggests that a moment of reckoning — another Argentinian tradition — is imminent. Net reserves (explains Reuters’s Jorge Otaola) mean “readily available funds, usually dollars, to meet debt repayments or import costs.” And Argentina does not have enough of them.
The vote for Milei is in no small part a vote against a disintegrating status quo, rather than a sudden embrace of free-market radicalism among Argentines. And Milei himself is still something of an unknown quantity. He is, however, undoubtedly quotable.
Central banks are divided in four categories: the bad ones, like the Federal Reserve; the very bad ones, like the ones in Latin America; the horribly bad ones; and the Central Bank of Argentina.
The Economist has a helpful description (paywalled) of Milei here. If he is a libertarian (not always the most precise of terms), he is one who appears to attract some support from the far right.
And say what you will, this former “tantric sex coach” is not, well, bland.
The Economist:
Hard Rock blared from the speakers as 10,000 fans cheered. An image of a roaring lion surrounded by fire lit up the screen. Jumping on stage, a man in a leather jacket whipped the crowd into a frenzy. “I am the lion!” he cried. “I am the king in a lost world!” It was not a rock concert. The speaker was Javier Milei.
Lions have manes, and Milei has, well, this (via Jacob Gallagher, writing in the Wall Street Journal):
[It] isn’t quite a mullet, moptop or mohawk but some complex combination of the three. It seems to move in all directions at once, culminating in a swoop that resembles a treacherous alpine slope or a scrap-metal John Chamberlain sculpture. It looks like a musk ox crossbred with Ozzy Osbourne. That rock-star touch seems rooted in Milei’s background: In his teens, he played in Everest, a band that primarily covered Rolling Stones songs.
While he has lately been seen more regularly in suits than his once-uniform leather jacket, Milei’s hair remains as unkempt as ever. In Argentina, the commentariat have nicknamed him El Peluca, or “The Wig.” . . .
Political experts see Milei’s hair as a reflection of his nonconformist campaign, in which he has advocated to shutter the country’s central bank, replace the peso with the dollar and create a market for selling human organs. . . .
For Milei, the attention-hogging hairstyle may indeed have helped lift him to victory in the primary. “His eccentric persona, from his wild hairstyle to the blaring rock music at his rallies, symbolizes the dramatic change that many voters long for,” the Wilson Center’s Gedan wrote.
Still, the politician has in the past bristled at all the attention on his flurry of follicles. In a 2016 tweet, he clapped back at a critic, writing in Spanish: “People with low capacity focus on my hair and not on ideas.”
Duly shamed, I shall stop now.