Argentina's outsider presidential aspirant, Javier Milei, is a rare breed — a hirsute 52-year-old libertarian economist with a hatred of all things authoritarian, including China’s ruling Communist Party, and a penchant for tantric sex.
And he just placed first in his country’s presidential primary contest.
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“One of the biggest thieves in the history of humankind is the Central Bank,” Milei told the Buenos Aires Times earlier this week. “We should try to get out of the blinders that the statist indoctrination imposed on us.”
It’s a battle cry to warm the hearts of the most committed old supporter of Ron Paul, the former Texas congressman whose libertarian beliefs and online popularity made him an unexpected factor in the 2008 and 2012 Republican presidential primary contests.
Yet Paul and his fellow travelers never scaled the heights reached by Milei in Argentina, where a dire economic crisis in combination with almost two decades of left-wing rule has finally persuaded voters to look longingly toward Milei.
“He’s an economist because he’s very brash and outspoken. He’s got a lot of angles [to suggest] he’s the right guy for the time,” Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Joseph Humire told the Washington Examiner.
So far, at least, everything is going according to Milei’s plan. His brash rhetoric, fiery hostility to elites, and unique hairstyle have drawn a series of comparisons to former U.S. President Donald Trump, but the self-described "anarcho-capitalist" sees his candidacy as an operation of philosophical laws.
"Liberalism was created to free people from the oppression of monarchs converted into tyrants,” he said in 2021. “It’s logical that the more people are against the ropes and the less they are favored, the more they will embrace the ideas of freedom.”
Argentina’s economy has deteriorated since 2019, when an election-year financial crisis doomed center-right President Mauricio Macri’s reelection and brought to power the center-left Argentine President Alberto Fernandez. In December, his running mate, Vice President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was sentenced to six years in prison for charges stemming from a $1 billion graft scandal, and the president decided not to seek reelection. Argentina’s inflation rate hit an eye-watering 113% in July, a modest improvement from June’s 115 percent inflation rate, and Milei emerged from the Aug. 13 open primary with 30.5% of the vote.
“Politically, they've been under a kind of a stranglehold of successive governments, namely the Kirchners ... that have pretty much just been trying to indoctrinate the country to be much more collectivist, statist,” Humire said. "Milei is really the reaction to that.”
It’s a sign of the dissatisfaction with the ruling party that Milei’s center-right rivals garnered 28% of the vote. Argentine Economy Minister Sergio Massa, the closest thing to an incumbent in the race, placed third with 27%. Those results leave the candidates little margin for error heading into an October general election likely to culminate in a November runoff between two finalists unless one of the candidates can consolidate 45% of the electorate or beat the others by 10 points.
“Anything could happen right now, in this election,” Dr. Evan Ellis, a U.S. Army War College professor and former State Department official who studies Chinese influence in Latin America, told the Washington Examiner. “Just about any one of the three right now could could win, but I think it clearly shows that Argentine voters are just angry and fed up.”
Sensing that opportunity, Milei reportedly de-prioritized a steamy and high-profile romance with his former model and pop star girlfriend, Daniela Mori in order to focus on politics. The singer remembers him fondly; she confirmed to journalists this week that her 2018 song, “Tantric Bomb,” is a) about Milei and b) anchored entirely in the truth.
"He was always like that, very euphoric, very passionate,” she said this week before offering some insight into his hair care routine. "He would come out with wet hair from bathing, wrapped in a towel, and the little that was wet, he would stick his head out the [car] window and dry his hair. It seemed great to me.”
Milei may be less rigorously ideological than his invocations of Murray Rothbard might suggest. “Philosophically, I’m an anarcho-capitalist, but in real life, I’m a minimalist,” he said in 2021, during a successful run for congress from Buenos Aires, and in the same interview, praised Ben Bernanke as “the right person in the right place at the right time” when the financial crisis hit in 2007 and 2008.
Yet he launched his general election campaign with a broadside against Chinese Communist tyranny.
“People are not free in China, they can’t do what they want, and when they do it, they get killed,” he said.
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Encouragingly for the United States, he also has said he would regard the U.S. “as our big strategic partner,” regardless of who wins the 2024 elections, raising the potential for China to emerge as a wedge issue in a country that Beijing regards as a keystone of its ambitions in the Western Hemisphere.
“There’s definitely a large group of Argentines who are worried about China’s influence in the country,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies nonresident senior associate, Lauri Tahtinen, told the Washington Examiner. “It’s something that hasn’t been voiced to the extent that maybe you’d think in the Argentine discourse thus far. ... It’s going to reverberate through Argentine politics. He is forcing other candidates to stake out a position.”