When Javier Milei was sworn in as Argentina’s new president one year ago on Dec. 10, 2024, critics who predicted he’d be booted out of office within months joked that his fate was about as much of a mystery as the date of Easter: “April or May,” they quipped, “you never quite know when they fall.”

In a country where even shrewd outsiders have repeatedly proven no match for the entrenched powers of trade unions and their Peronist allies, and in a political system that once famously cycled through five presidents in the span of 11 days, a maverick newcomer like Mr. Milei stood little chance of implementing the deep structural reforms he had promised voters, so the conventional wisdom went.

But one year later, the prophecies of certain political demise for the world’s first “libertarian” head of state have — decidedly and repeatedly — turned out to be not only greatly exaggerated, but flatly wrong.

Instead, the 54-year-old political outsider has fulfilled key campaign promises by clamping down on runaway inflation and shrinking the bloated public sector, all while forging close ties with fellow maverick Donald Trump, who, at least by the Argentine government’s official account, has dubbed Mr. Milei his “favorite president.”

The Argentine president has even permitted himself a victory lap or two as his first year concludes.

“Everyone assumed we were going to fail politically,” Mr. Milei told a cheering crowd at a conference in Buenos Aires last week organized by the U.S.-based Conservative Political Action Committee. “Today they admit — through gritted teeth — that they are surprised.”

The economist with the trademark helmet of unkempt hair, previously known to Argentine voters as a flamboyant if foul-mouthed TV commentator, had reinvented himself as a first-term congressman only two years before ascending to the country’s highest office.

Amid the country’s seemingly never-ending economic and fiscal crises, Mr. Milei rode a wave of discontent targeting his unpopular predecessor and the political establishment — “the caste,” as he dubbed them — as a whole, defeating Peronist Sergio Massa, the government’s economy minister, in a runoff election late last year.

There were hurdles from the start: Mr. Milei’s La Libertad Avanza coalition accounts for fewer than one in 10 lawmakers in the Senate — and fewer than one in six in the House. The new president came into office with an ambitious agenda but a weak position in Congress, which needs to greenlight many of the reform proposals he champions.

Forced to heavily rely on congressional allies — primarily former President Mauricio Macri’s center-right PRO — his government needed almost six months to pass his signature, 42,000-word mega-law aimed at disrupting and deregulating Argentina’s stuttering, dysfunctional economy.

Frequently and controversially, Mr. Milei opted to outmaneuver the hesitant legislature, using presidential decree powers to push through unpopular measures such as heavy cuts to long-standing transportation and utility subsidies. Public protests and labor strikes erupted and many pundits proclaimed that the Milei experiment was already doomed.

But the axe he took to government spending quickly yielded the intended effect: Inflation, long the Achilles heel of the economy, dropped from more than 25% per month in December 2023 to below 3% last month. The value of government bonds and the Argentine peso are on the upswing, and Argentina’s country-risk index, which measures the likelihood of yet another default, has fallen to its lowest level since 2020.

But the austerity agenda also meant economic hardship for some. Unemployment is up to 8%, thousands of government workers have been let go, work on public projects approved by previous governments has come to a standstill, and the national poverty rate has risen.

The costs for once-subsidized goods and services such as public transport, energy, water and health insurance skyrocketed in the same time frame.

The cost of a Buenos Aires subway ride, for example, rose from 52 pesos, then about 6 cents, to 757 pesos, about 75 cents. A $4.50 December 2023 water bill for a small apartment could be as high as $15.60 a year later.

But Mr. Milei’s government weathered the storm, and some say he has finally broken the economic fever that has stunted Argentine growth and left the government in a near-perpetual state of fiscal crisis and foreign indebtedness.

The inflation turnaround, a balanced budget and the recovery in foreign-currency reserves make for a macroeconomic success story in the eyes of veteran political commentator Joaquin Morales Sola.

“We’ve spent 40 years talking about the government spending more than it takes in, and no one did anything to control that spending; the first one is Milei,” Mr. Morales Sola said. “For him, what matters is … the budget surplus; that’s at the core of his administration.”

The first battle may have been won, but the war is not over, the pundit warned.

The cost of living has increased so dramatically that “no salary can hold out against the price hikes,” he cautioned — a fact Mr. Milei ignores at his own political peril: “No [one] in his crew considers what the Argentine economy will be like six months from now — not six years from now,” he said.

Public approval

For the time being, however, Argentines’ patience does not yet seem to be wearing thin — with Mr. Milei’s November approval rating clocking in at 57%, up seven points from September, in a recent survey.

“Last year it was a shock to the system, I couldn’t keep up with the prices,” 34-year-old deli worker Jazmin Quintana recently told The Associated Press. “I’m not saying I like the guy, I find his personality very weird and aggressive, but I admit — if he continues on this route, I’ll be very happy.”

Mr. Milei is being credited with an unexpected streak of pragmatism, giving up — or at least deferring — some of his more radical campaign promises such as introducing the U.S. dollar as the country’s currency and closing the Central Bank, political scientist Marcos Novaro said.

Nevertheless, the level of support in the face of continued economic hardships surprised Mr. Novaro, the author of the recent book “Why It Is So Difficult to Govern Argentina.”

“One could imagine society [saying]: … ’It’s worth it to get out of this situation we’re fed up with — years and years of stagnation, inflation, lack of perspectives,” Mr. Novaro said. “But at any rate, [the backing for Mr. Milei] was even greater than I would have expected.”

There has been a worrying pattern of short-term popularity and long-term discredit for past Argentine reformers. Many of his predecessors actually trumped Mr. Milei in first-year approval, Mr. Morales Sola noted, agreeing with Mr. Novaro that part of the “credit” for his success goes to the opposition, which — despite its numerical strength in Congress — has often made his life easy.

Case in point: After an ugly, very public leadership battle, the Peronist Party, ostensibly the main opposition movement, picked as its leader embattled former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, only days before an appellate court confirmed her six-year sentence on corruption charges.

To make matters worse, Argentina’s Supreme Court earlier this month ruled that Ms. Fernandez will also have to stand trial for allegedly helping Iran cover up the 1994 terrorist bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires — a charge originally brought by prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who died under mysterious circumstances in 2015, the last year of Ms. Fernandez’s presidency.

“If that’s the type of opponent, it’s understandable that the people resign themselves to ’Milei or nothing,’” Mr. Novaro said. “[You] don’t get rid of a president without having some alternative — and right now, there is no political alternative,” Mr. Morales Sola added.

To the extent that the combative president has faced any real challenges, it has been in the streets, with general strikes in January and May and, in October, nationwide rallies against cuts to the budgets of state universities.

“Ten days after Milei took office, we held the first demonstration against him,” Workers’ Left Front presidential candidate Myriam Bregman — who lost to Mr. Milei in the first round of last year’s presidential elections — told The Washington Times.

Ms. Bregman, too, blamed the main opposition forces — particularly the Peronists — for failing to effectively challenge what she views as Mr. Milei’s “pro-IMF, anti-worker” policies.

“Apart from speeches,” Ms. Bregman said, ” [they] either joined Milei’s government or decided not to confront it.”

Her own party’s five lawmakers in the House, meanwhile, had consistently voted against all of the president’s bills and would continue to do so, Ms. Bregman said.

“Deals or contact with the government? Never!” she said.

Tight with Trump

Ms. Bregman’s sentiments echo those of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftist icon on the continent whose longstanding enmity with Mr. Milei was on full display at the mid-November G-20 summit in Rio de Janeiro. But while dubbing Mr. da Silva a “corrupt communist” earned him a cold welcome in Rio, Mr. Milei’s colorful language and libertarian principles have also propelled him to near-rock star status among American conservatives and the European right.

His outspokenness on the international stage — at Davos, he accused business leaders of promoting “radical feminism,” while at the G-20, he derided his counterparts’ “notion that more government intervention is the way to fight hunger” — has earned him comparisons with Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Milei visited in Mar-a-Lago just days after the U.S. election.

His close ties to the incoming administration mean Mr. Milei need not worry so much about being out of sync with the — mostly left-leaning — governments in Latin America, Mr. Novaro noted.

“The Trump wave gives Milei the [political] climate and [latitude] he needs,” Mr. Novaro said.

It also has given him some maneuvering space on foreign affairs, despite his campaign criticisms of foreign leaders. The Milei government signed a long-sought pipeline deal to sell shale gas to Mr. da Silva’s government, and he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G-20 Rio summit to discuss expanded bilateral trade and investment, despite his repeated pledge to “not make pacts with communists.”

“Since he has the credentials of being a Trumpist of the first hour, he can go sit down with the Chinese,” Mr. Novaro said, “without anyone saying that he bowed his head.”

Celebrity and pragmatism aside, though, Mr. Milei’s abrasiveness still may land him in trouble over the long run, Mr. Morales Sola insisted.

“He’s a man who insults anyone who does not totally agree with him in the worst terms,” the La Nacion columnist said, adding that Mr. Milei’s “hyperbole” was “very similar to the language used by President-elect Trump.”

But while his rhetoric may be off-putting, it is not without political rhyme and reason, Mr. Novaro suggested.

“There is a history of governments that wanted to make reforms and failed because of ’republican’ formality,” he said. “When [Mr. Milei] says … ’I’ll use the [left-wing] populists’ instruments to defeat them,’ that makes a lot of sense.”

And like him or not, the one thing Argentine voters don’t want is return to the past, Mr. Morales Sola said.

“Milei is a product of the failure of what came before,” he said. “People believe this man — who’s doing things differently from other Argentine presidents — might also get different results.”