Who is Javier Milei?
It is often believed that a president speaks through his legacy.
But the first libertarian president in the history of Argentina speaks on Twitter.
He speaks on Instagram.
And from time to time, through YouTube.
And he does it in the same fiery tone that marked the pulse of his presidential campaign.
In many respects, the head of state continues to behave like a candidate rather than a president with all the responsibilities of the office.
In the first days of his government, the leader of La Libertad Avanza has begun to write his legacy with a bias that contradicts the very postulates of the anarcho-capitalist philosophy to which he appeals to build his story of power.
Meanwhile, instead of proposing a reconciliation within the framework of 40 years of uninterrupted democracy for an Argentina that has long needed to rediscover itself, it sinks its chainsaw and opens a crack different from everything we have experienced until now, in which only those who are valid are valid. He thinks the same as him and the other is discarded as a traitor.
The repeal of constitutional guarantees acquired with decades of struggle in the streets and the gradual erosion of key aspects that make up human rights in our country, hidden within a decree and a law of incomprehensible volume for a rational debate in the times it demands the intention to refound a State, are the only possible path of reconstruction, in his opinion.
But it is a narrow path on which two do not walk side by side.
“Agreement yes, not consensus against change,” Milei concluded in his first speech before the Legislative Assembly on March 1, when addressing the governors present and absent.
His particular invitation to an understanding was the closest thing to an attempt to build agreements, although it sounds more like imposition than dialogue.
Although its Law of Bases and Starting Points for the Freedom of Argentines was shipwrecked before setting sail – and decree 70/2023 is 80% judicialized with the labor chapter suspended by the courts – the Government has already announced that it will insist with his original plan to refound the State.
That some aspects of its operation require modernization and greater transparency is a common feeling – only this explains why the discourse of caste has penetrated so deeply in society – but Milei directly qualifies the State as a “criminal association” and in the collective imagination, The only place that fits criminals is prison.
Left aside are their social responsibilities in the redistribution of resources to balance the inequalities of origin in society.
Argentinians pray before receiving a bag of charity food in Villa Fiorito, a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina, on February 27. Agustin Marcarian (REUTERS)
How is the closure of Inadi – which requires a law and not a simple stroke of a pen –, the first of its kind capable of developing diversity and equality policies worldwide, linked to the privileges of the caste that Milei set out to eradicate? ?
The president defined it as a “thought police” because, among the functions of the institute, one of its duties is to take action against violent public discourse such as the one that he himself usually champions.
How does your promise to punish the caste translate with the suspension of the delivery of oncology medications and for rare diseases or the dismissal of workers from the National Disability Agency?
It is sarcastic, if not reprehensible, that just a few days before the president himself contributed to the dissemination of a publication by his followers characterizing an opposition governor as a person with Down syndrome.
States are primarily responsible for guaranteeing human rights.
As head of a nation and signatory of international treaties, a President cannot endorse violent speeches and criminal practices that go diametrically opposite to one of his central functions.
Milei against everyone
In just over two months, Milei transferred his panelist and tweeting style of empathizing with public opinion, or a majority part of it, from the media audience, to his office in the Casa Rosada and Quinta de Olivos.
And she made that the mark of her management.
She likes and retweets those who think like him or praise him.
She disqualifies or reproduces the insults against those who do it differently.
She insults artists and journalists who say things she doesn't like.
And she neutralizes any hint of political negotiation, even with those who are willing to support her measures.
When political setbacks surrounded his government, he resorted to old political strategies of distraction to divert the public conversation.
The presentation of a project to repeal the abortion law, supported by a public column with the signature of the Treasury Attorney, Rodolfo Barra, head of the State's lawyers, is the most obvious example.
This was supported by a speech by Milei at the conference in Davos where he spoke out against family planning, as well as the official declaration of 2024 as the “year of defense of life, property and freedom” in official documents.
In essence, a desperate move within the framework of the failure of his ambitious omnibus law, with a hint of revenge, which not only lacks any consensus in Congress to advance but even comes into tension with the libertarian ideas that he claims to defend.
The American theorist Murray Rothbard, of whom Milei calls himself a follower, points out in the libertarian manifesto that “there is no more personal right, a more precious freedom for any woman than deciding whether to have, or not to have, a baby.
And any government that seeks to deny that right acts in an extremely totalitarian manner.”
These contradictions do not go unnoticed in the international press that is still seeking to understand the election of millions of Argentinian men and women.
Even so, none of this makes a dent in the information bubble that the president built around himself and those who think the same as him.
The term was coined more than a decade ago by digital activist and entrepreneur Eli Pariser and refers to the filters that condition free access to information, causing the so-called confirmation bias.
This is largely how social networks work, feeding back to their users with filtered information that confirms their way of thinking.
The president measures the success of his decisions based on impressions of his posts on social networks and that is not a state secret.
On more than one occasion he responded with these statistics when he was consulted in an interview about his measures: if the public encounter in the virtual arena with a governor generated sufficient approval or visibility, he cites it as an argument that validates the behavior.
Those who disagree are disqualified: the trial and sentence are carried out from the digital audience where the president is prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time.
Of course, nothing is permanent, if measured by the ephemeral duration of a timeline.
And the harshest sentences can be reversed, displaying a pragmatism that also characterized Milei's political construction.
Argentine women during a protest in support of access to safe and legal abortion in Buenos Aires, in September 2023. MARIANA NEDELCU (REUTERS)
A synthesis of all this was seen with the publication of the now historic meme of a lion hugging a duck that the head of state used to publicize his alliance with Patricia Bullrich, a former rival in the electoral campaign of whom he spread false accusations about his responsibility in an attack on a kindergarten during his militancy in armed organizations in the '70s and then embraced her and appointed her as his Minister of Security.
When both were invited to a news network to formalize the pact, after the first electoral round in October 2023, he commented quietly when greeting her.
The current person responsible for promoting a protocol that puts a stop to social protest and whose constitutionality must be resolved by Justice, she did not know what to respond.
A tailor-made epic
In this scenario, Javier Milei's circle of confidants is limited to a very small group that has been with him for a long time and who, paradoxically, are the ones who never speak in public.
The few who try to do it for him, outside of this group, often end up disqualified by the head of state himself, who usually gives his presidential mission a framework of a messianic feat.
All the paraphernalia of his story is adorned with a biblical epic in a scenario in which the discrepancies are presented in terms of good versus immorality, without admission of lukewarmness or delay.
None of that is coincidental.
If in short, the strategy of the outsider to the system was functional in a campaign in which the president consolidated his third of power between the PASO and the first round, although he prefers to return again and again to 56% of the ballot to arrogate to himself a greater representativeness and the right to polarize without half measures with those who challenge it.
It is true that Milei still retains a high core of social support and that drives it to move forward with its reform policy even if it impacts the life chances and rights of the most vulnerable, with poverty and indigence that climbed to 57 .4% and 14% in January, respectively.
There are already 27 million people under the vulnerability line and seven million those who do not get the minimum to eat in Argentina.
Among children, from 0 to 17 years old, the percentage of poor rises to 63.9%.
Likewise, 4 out of 10 retirees live below the poverty line.
And at least 3.5 million earn the minimum salary of $204,445, which is not enough to cover the basic basket of a retired person, which as of October 2023 was $313,185.
And in the middle, inflation took two jumps that exceeded the accumulated 50% only in the first two months of government.
Heading into the first three months of administration, the president's construction of power rests on the enthronement of enemies with whom he can confront and justify, ultimately, his own shortcomings in management.
He defined Congress as a “rat's nest” when all efforts to move his law forward failed, largely due to his intransigence.
Thus, in these first 100 days, social support and the movement of the political map will mark the future of the days that follow.
Mariela Belski
is executive director of Amnesty International in Argentina.
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