The Milei symptom

Public opinion investigations insist that Javier Milei, the far-right candidate of the group La Libertad Avanza, has become the leader preferred by Argentines. It has already passed a floor of 24% of voting intention and there is still 39% who "maybe would vote for it". According to these studies, a scenario is being configured in which Milei could participate in an eventual second round, after the presidential elections to be held on October 22. This economist, who began to become popular no more than four years ago, advances almost without territorial structure. With the liturgy of a rock star, he organizes rallies that he calls "recitals." It preaches slogans of the most conservative right, akin to Vox, in Spain, or to Bolsonarism, in Brazil. The stridency of this candidate draws attention but, perhaps, prevents observing the sea of background that drives him.

The Argentina on which the figure of Milei is projected has not grown for a decade. For five years it has been embroiled in a delicate crisis: it renegotiated its debt but remains on the verge of default; annual inflation has already exceeded 110%; savers flee the peso in search of dollars, which they cannot get because the authorities blocked the exchange market; The salary is pulverized and poverty exceeds 40% marks. The effect of these miseries on mood is not only due to the magnitude of the deviations. The duration of the discomfort is also very important.

The main effect of this persistence is that it is impossible to blame a single political force for the disaster. Cristina Kirchner governed between 2007 and 2015; he was succeeded by Mauricio Macri, between 2015 and 2019, which is when Alberto Fernández arrived supported by Mrs. Kirchner. The parties changed but the problems worsened. This explains why the polarization kirchnerismo/antikirchnerismo, or macrismo/antimacrismo, which explained Argentine public life for at least 15 years, is losing validity. Many citizens begin to believe that "everyone is to blame".

On this feeling works Milei, who proposes a new contradiction. The left and the right are no longer opposed. Now it's the people against the leadership. Those above and those below. The music bears a resemblance to that played by Pablo Iglesias from the Spanish ultra-left of Podemos. The slogan is to end "the caste". The lyrics, however, are the opposite.

Milei was radicalizing his speech. He began by criticizing public spending, especially because it is financed by monetary issuance, which fuels inflation and the consequent deterioration of wages. Then he took his criticism of the state and, a little further, of the political bureaucracy. Sometimes it touches a last frontier. For example, when he says that the Argentine riots began in 1916, that is, with the democratization of the vote. Or when he confesses that, in his spare time, he throws darts at a photo of Alfonsin. Raúl Alfonsín assumed power in 1983, after the horrific dictatorship that began in 1976. That is why in the country he is considered the father of contemporary democracy. Milei attacks spending, later the state, a little later politics, and threatens to condemn the democratic system.

It is difficult to know whether the sympathy he arouses in increasingly diverse swaths of voters is inspired by these arguments or whether it is instead because they see him as angry. Angry like them. On stage, or on the TV set when interviewed, Milei becomes enraged, shouts, insults. He promises to use a chainsaw to finish almost everything.

Milei's offer is based on two more or less mythological solutions. End "caste" and solve the economic collapse with dollarization. The unknowns posed by the realization of these objectives are still uncleared. It seems to matter little. Qualitative analyses of public opinion, based on the interrogation of focus groups, interpret that this discourse hides a couple of keys to the candidate's success.

The condemnation of the political class reassures the consciences of voters who are being told that they are completely unresponsible for the calamitous state of the country. The culprits are those who rule. That same accusation separates Milei from the rest of the politicians. The other aspirants to govern from December of this year insinuate, with varying sincerity, the sacrifices that citizens must make so that material life is normalized. Instead, the far-right candidate suggests that those who will pay the cost are the politicians, who live off the state, which he intends to reduce. Argentines have already spent two decades listening to the diatribes of a speech that condemns the market from the court of politics. Are you now entering the reverse cycle? From the throne of the market politics is condemned.

The same appeal has the economic recipe of Milei. The peso will be abandoned and the dollar will be adopted. The adjustments that would be required to pass from one currency to another are shrouded in haze. Argentines who, to protect themselves from inflation, look for dollars, with Milei will have dollars. At what parity? For that answer we have to wait. This emerging leader has a model. But he doesn't have a project yet. That is, a model that can be implemented. It is curious: Cristina Kirchner, in a distributionism that ran out of dollars, is happening the same.

When he burst onto the scene, Milei was seen for what he is: a lover of the market, a cultist of capitalism without regulations, which would corrode the base of the PRO, Macri's party, which is part of the Together for Change coalition. This phenomenon continues, especially among young people. But he has begun to live with another. Milei is also threatening the base of Peronism led by Cristina Kirchner.

They are sectors of the impoverished lower middle class. There, too, the most attracted is youth. The seduction on this electoral strip is novel and can be explained by several reasons. The first has already been said: many people support Milei not because of what he says but because of how he says it. Express contained anger. A second: many of these poor citizens until recently belonged to the middle class. It has poor incomes, but political and cultural categories of its previous installation in the pyramid. The third hypothesis: the ultra-liberal candidate speaks to a multitude of young workers who self-manage their economy through digital platforms. They are drivers, delivery people and informal self-employed who want the State not to interfere in their way of earning their bread. The deployment of Milei towards this electoral universe is also explained by the fact that, tormented by an economic crisis of uncertain outcome, Peronism seems to be heading towards an electoral disaster.

Political perplexity

The departure of this candidate has introduced a state of such perplexity in Argentine politics that the questions he raises are not yet well defined. The most pressing: if Milei entered the second round and won, with what structure would he govern? What force would it have in Congress? Who would you look for as allies? He is asking himself these questions. That is why he no longer says that "the caste" is the political class. A week ago the definition changed: now they are the ones who make decisions against the people. Actually, Milei began to clarify, he is not against a caste, but against the status quo.

The journey of this candidate must still overcome several barriers. Especially one: those who identify with him in the surveys adhere to everything he says, do not wonder how he would come to realize it, but stop at an enigma: do Milei's recurring fits of fury mishide a deeper structure of emotional instability? Other details of this economist's personality may be part of folklore. For example, the determining influence of his sister Karina, a tarot reader who connects him with his dog dead in the afterlife.

Those outbursts of the candidate are very striking. They suggest that Milei is an innovation but, at the same time, a symptom. A disturbing symptom of the society that is being looked at in him. Argentina entered a traumatic storm 22 years ago. It was the collapse of convertibility, a fixed exchange rate regime in which each peso promised to be worth one dollar. The collapse of this system also devastated Fernando De la Rua's administration. Angry crowds, without any leadership, mobilized shouting "let them all go."

That outbreak was the cradle of two political subjects who sought to close the abyss between representatives and represented. They were Kirchnerism, as the dominant expression of Peronism, and Macrismo, as a channel of participation of the middle sectors that had become disenchanted with radicalism. Both forces starred, in aggressive competition, the political game of the last two decades. Today both show signs of exhaustion. One piece of evidence: Cristina Kirchner and Mauricio Macri, its leaders, are the two politicians with the worst image in all polls.

Milei challenges the electorate. But it also challenges the Peronist leadership of the Frente de Todos and its rivals from Together for Change. The rise of the new populist right will find a limit if these two actors manage to renew themselves.

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