“You’re our only hope of salvation!” shouted a voice from the crowd as a smiling Javier Milei waved from the back of a pick-up truck. He headed a football thrown his way by supporters waving yellows flags bearing the lion’s head emblem of his campaign to transform Argentina.
“Get rid of them all!”, his fans chanted. “Long live liberty!”
In one of his last rallies before next Sunday’s elections, the frontrunner appeared before hundreds of fans in the seaside town of Mar del Plata wearing his trademark black leather jacket and long sideburns.
He posed for selfies in the afternoon sun, invited children to join him on the truck and waved a chainsaw, a symbol of his promise to cut a sprawling state down to size.
“We need a change,” says Nancy Pizarro, a 61-year-old pensioner in the crowd. “We are tired of so much hypocrisy and of [the politicians] stealing so much from us. [Milei’s people] are the cleanest. That’s something we’ve never had.”
Milei, a 52-year-old libertarian economist with an outsize television personality and a minimal political career, has taken swaths of Argentina by storm. Thousands flock to his rallies, mobbing his convoy, honking car horns and chanting his battle cry of “freedom”.
Amid a deep economic crisis with prices rising at 138 per cent a year and around two-fifths of Argentines mired in poverty, opinion polls make Milei the narrow favourite to win the presidency either on Sunday or in a run-off vote next month. His appeal is especially strong among the youth and in the provinces.
This is despite — or perhaps, for some, because of — an eccentric personality which has included turns as a tantric sex guru and cosplay enthusiast, support for radical ideas such as legalising the sale of human organs and smashing a piñata of the central bank on television on his birthday.
Milei’s message is simple: a ruling “caste” of politicians and bureaucrats from the left and the right have ruined the country with rampant corruption and sky-high inflation. The solution is to shrink the state dramatically and dollarise the economy, scrapping Argentina’s heavily devalued peso and replacing it with the US currency.
In a wealthy nation blessed with abundant natural resources but cursed by decades of economic mismanagement, the message has obvious appeal.
“I’ve not cast a vote for 10 years,” says Catrina Troncaro, a 31-year-old cook at Milei’s Mar del Plata rally. “I used to spoil my ballot paper . . . For years I have thought it was a choice between cold shit or hot shit. For the first time, it seems there is someone who is not shit.”
But beyond his fervent supporters, many here worry that a man with almost no political or administrative experience — Milei was first elected to congress in December 2021 and has never managed an organisation, let alone a country — is hopelessly ill-prepared to run a country with Argentina’s massive problems.
“The mood is one of fear,” says Eduardo Costantini, a billionaire property developer. “Fear because the candidate who won the primaries is a libertarian and . . . his proposals are not credible. “I don’t think Milei has the maturity to be president, he doesn’t have the experience or the team. He is too much of an extremist.”
Argentina’s foreign debt, which might have been expected to rally on predictions of a victory by a free-market economist promising radical spending cuts, has instead slid in recent weeks on worries about governability. The benchmark 2035 sovereign bonds were trading at 24.1 cents on the dollar on October 17, down from 30.4 cents before Milei’s victory in the primaries.
Milei has done nothing to reassure the doubters. His brief Mar del Plata appearance, like many of his campaign stops, was designed for social media, with catchy slogans, a carnival atmosphere and eye-catching visuals. He made no speech and did not talk to waiting reporters. After less than an hour in the streets, he was gone.
The change candidate
A self-styled anarcho-capitalist, Milei believes in unfettered free markets, unrestricted free trade and giving primacy to private property and individual freedom.
His beloved English Mastiff dogs, cloned from the DNA of a dead pet named Conan, carry the names of conservative economists: Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard and Robert Lucas. He thanked his “four-legged children” in his victory speech after winning Argentina’s primary elections in August.
His closest adviser is his 51-year-old sister Karina, like him unmarried and a dog lover. He has compared her in interviews to the Jewish prophet Moses and himself to Aaron, Moses’ brother.
Such idiosyncrasies, along with a knack for grabbing headlines with deliberately provocative comments on everything from the Pope (“a Jesuit who promotes communism”) to the peso (“excrement”), have guaranteed Milei blanket media coverage in Argentina and helped him build a distinctive persona on social media.
These factors also make it harder to decipher how the disruptive outsider might govern if he wins the presidential race. There is no track record to go on: Milei has less than two years experience as a congressman and his top team are mostly drawn from academia or the private sector.
His La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) movement, largely created around his personality, is unlikely to win more than a fraction of seats in congress or any provincial governorships in next Sunday’s elections. Conventional wisdom says that an outsider with such a weak base will struggle to govern a country whose political complexity has defeated countless seasoned insiders.
Milei’s election manifesto is peppered with contradictions. It pledges to shrink the number of Argentine government ministries from 18 to eight to save money, but also promises that displaced career civil servants will be reassigned to other areas and not fired, raising questions about how to deliver his promised 15 per cent of GDP in budget savings. Cuts in costly energy subsidies, it says, “will not directly affect the pockets of Argentines”.
Some observers believe a Milei presidency might last less than a year, ending in chaos and another election. “If he is elected, he will have to be a different character or there will be an institutional crisis,” says one senior diplomat in Buenos Aires.
Guillermo Francos, Milei’s candidate for interior minister, disputes such gloomy assessments. A 73-year-old career politician and lawyer, he describes himself as “the other side of the Milei coin”, emphasising how he will sit down to negotiate with other political groupings if his boss becomes president.
“I am a person of dialogue,” he says. Even without a majority in parliament “we can build an accord to transform the country. After 40 years [since the return to democracy] the political system has failed. That’s an enormous opportunity.”
Argentina’s business leaders still harbour doubts. Eduardo Eurnekian, the billionaire whose Corporación América conglomerate once employed Milei as chief economist, has backed away from him during the campaign and criticised the dollarisation pledge.
Others are more optimistic about Milei. Eduardo Elsztain, an influential businessman with interests in real estate, agriculture and gold mining, says the election choice, between Milei, the Peronist candidate and current economy minister Sergio Massa and the conservative Patricia Bullrich, is “marvellous”: “We have three pro-market candidates running. We have never had that before.”
Although sometimes described as Argentina’s answer to Donald Trump or Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Milei’s political philosophy differs from them both. Nationalism is not an important part of his message and his extreme economic liberalism would not tolerate the big government deficits run by Trump or Bolsonaro’s pre-election spending spree on handouts for the poor.
On culture issues, Milei does share some common ground with the two hard-right former leaders. He opposes abortion and favours liberalising gun ownership, though these take a back seat to his small-state economic message.
Like Trump, he has a natural ability to entertain. In his youth, Milei played football and sang in a rock and roll band, before studying economics. “This is an attractive combination in terms of a television product,” he later said.
After teaching economics to university students and working for Corporación América, he found fame as a commentator on television chat shows, making scathing diagnoses of Argentina’s economic woes and arguing that the solutions for fixing them were simple.
His overwhelmingly young, mostly male voters do not all share his ultra free-market views, says Juan Germano, a pollster at Isonomia. “The Milei voter doesn’t necessarily think the same way as Milei,” he says. “In fact he thinks quite differently . . . if you think that there is 30 per cent [of the electorate] which is pro-market, anarcho-capitalist and liberal, you are not understanding the election.”
Voters are drawn by a message of radical change and a wacky, unconventional media image which mocks convention and promises to upend politics. “The demand for change is so tremendous that there’s a group of people who don’t click [through] to see exactly what Milei’s ideas are,” he says.
Big problems
The winner of Sunday’s elections will inherit a wrecked economy, a deeply divided nation and an anxious population.
Inflation is forecast to reach 210 per cent by the end of this year, estimates JPMorgan, but given the current fractious environment, the country could spiral sooner than that into what Argentines call “el híper” — hyperinflation, which swept the country in the late 1980s.
Mario Grinman, president of the Argentine Chamber of Commerce, says what is happening is “inconceivable” in a nation which is a major world food exporter with abundant reserves of shale oil and gas and a fast-growing lithium industry.
“Argentina does not have an economic problem, it has a political, cultural and institutional problem,” he says. “For the last 80 years, at least, our political leaders, of whatever political colour or ideology or party you like, have totally failed to achieve the basis of a sustainable economy.”
According to OECD figures, Argentina has a total tax take of 29 per cent of GDP, well above the Latin American average and close to the rich-country mean of 34 per cent. It spends more of its national wealth on education than the OECD average, yet its results in international tests are below par.
Billions of dollars of public funds vanish into an elaborate web of welfare programmes and subsidies constructed under Peronist governments. Critics say they divert resources from productive investment and are a disincentive to work. The state, says Grinman, has “the pocket of a clown. You put money into it, put more money in, yet more and you never fill it. It’s a bottomless pit.”
The number of formal jobs in the private sector has barely grown in more than a decade, and more than half of employed Argentines work either off the books or for the state.
In such a febrile atmosphere, Milei’s two main challengers have struggled to convince the electorate they are the answer to the country’s deep-seated problems.
Massa, the candidate for the ruling party, is a wily dealmaker hailing from the party’s more pragmatic, pro-market wing. But as economy minister for the past 14 months, he has presided over the rapid acceleration in inflation, a collapse in the peso’s value and an explosion of central bank money-printing to pay for additional handouts. In wealthier districts of Buenos Aires, campaign posters of Massa with the eyes scratched out are common.
Bullrich, a 67-year-old hardliner from a patrician family whose storied name adorns streets and an upmarket shopping centre, emerged from a divisive primary as candidate for the main centre-right opposition Juntos por el Cambio, originally the favourites to win the election.
But her tough law-and-order message has failed to inspire crowds, while critics say her wooden campaign performances concentrate fire on the Peronists and lack strong attack lines against Milei. A past role as security minister in the unpopular government of Mauricio Macri, which left the country saddled with a $44bn IMF bailout and a serious recession, hangs over her.
The dollar question
Against two opponents whose careers make them epitomes of the political class many Argentines despise, Milei stands out as offering something new and different.
But his solution to reviving the economy — adopting the US dollar as legal tender — is not just radical but risky, in the view of many economists.
The country currently has negative net reserves of hard currency and would need months of strong exports to accumulate the stock of dollars, estimated at $40-60bn, needed to back dollarisation.
A previous attempt in the 1990s to fix the Argentine currency to the dollar at 1:1 delivered several years of price stability but ultimately failed after the country continued to run deficits.
Demand for dollars has surged in recent weeks, so much so that Massa was forced to clamp down on the black market dollar trade as its price shot up to more than 1,000 pesos. The normally bustling offices of money-changers on their hub on Calle Florida in central Buenos Aires were closed last week.
Argentines often clamour for dollars during periods of uncertainty, but demand was bolstered by Milei’s comparison of the currency to “excrement” and his advice to the public not to keep savings in peso term deposits.
The Peronist-led banking union accused Milei of “electoral terrorism” and the banks called on candidates to avoid “unfounded statements which generate uncertainty and volatility” but Milei shrugged off the criticism and repeated the description later the same week.
Alfonso Prat-Gay, a former finance minister under the Macri government and central bank president prior to that, believes that Milei’s attacks on the peso may be deliberate. “Milei knows he can’t govern without a complete collapse,” he says. “If he wins the election, he needs everything to blow up before he takes power in December. He needs the bill for the final debacle to be paid by the other side.”
What Argentina really needs, according to Alberto Ramos, chief Latin America economist at Goldman Sachs, is a rapid and dramatic fiscal adjustment, an independent central bank and wide-ranging structural reforms to make the country more open and flexible.
Without this kind of fiscal discipline, dollarisation is unlikely to bring benefits, he wrote in a recent note. “It would entail very significant costs in terms of growth and employment, or would eventually collapse. Dollarisation can be part of a broader solution to your most intractable problems, but at the same time, in isolation, no solution at all.”
A senior member of Milei’s economic team rejects that criticism, saying the debate is “ridiculous” because Argentina is in effect already dollarised with the US currency in widespread unofficial use for contracts, big transactions and savings. “Argentines have $250bn in dollar bills stashed under their mattresses or in safe deposit boxes because they don’t trust the banks,” he says.
The highly technical arguments about the pros and cons of dollarisation are lost on Milei’s voters. Andrés Gallardo, an industrial design student at Milei’s Mar del Plata rally, says he has never been so sure about whom to vote for.
“Milei today has given us new hope,” he explains. “A lot of people say it’s a protest vote that shows a lack of respect for the voter. I am really voting out of conviction. And I’m sure that if [Milei] succeeds, he will change Argentina once and for all.”
Additional reporting by Nicolás Gallardo in Mar del Plata
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