Under siege: Argentina’s president drops his chainsaw

For a few months, our president was “the ‘golden boy’ of global politics”, said Agustino Fontevecchia in the Buenos Aires Times. An eccentric former TV pundit and devotee of the free market who owns five cloned dogs named after monetarist economists, Javier Milei is beloved by right-wingers for taking a “chainsaw” to government spending and regulation.

Scenting blood

Elon Musk has lauded him as a “beacon of hope”; Kemi Badenoch has held him up as the “template” for all conservative leaders. And for a while, his highly controversial economic blueprint “appeared to be working”: since his election in 2023, Argentina’s inflation has dropped from 211% to 43%, and in January, the country posted a fiscal surplus for the first time in 14 years.

But now “the first anarcho-capitalist president in world history”, as he proclaims himself to be, is “under siege”. His administration has been embroiled in an explosive corruption scandal involving his sister; and early last month, his party, Liberty Advances, suffered a shock defeat in local elections in Buenos Aires. The markets then went haywire – forcing the central bank to spend $1 billion propping up the peso. The Peronist opposition is now scenting blood.

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Cue Donald Trump, said Claudio Jacquelin in La Nación (Buenos Aires). Last week his administration stepped in with a “game-changer” – $20 billion in emergency credit to get Milei through the next few months. It’s an “extraordinary” payment for what are essentially junk bonds, said The Economist. Trump is offering this lifeline solely because he doesn’t want his libertarian pal’s wild economic project to fail. Uncle Sam is now “underwriting Milei’s laboratory”.

A foolish loyalty

Even more precarious is the increasingly weird situation with the president’s sister, said Javier Lorca in El País (Madrid). Karina Milei, referred to by Javier as “the boss”, wields enormous power. One of her previous jobs was selling cupcakes over social media: now she’s effectively both first lady and vice-president. But recently, an aide was recorded claiming she took a 3% cut of state pharmaceutical contracts, and she has become a real liability. The president dotes on her, however – she has been a huge emotional support since childhood, he says, when she shielded him from their violent father. So he’s stubbornly sticking by her, claiming the tapes are lies.

A foolish loyalty maybe, said James Neilson in Buenos Aires Times, but he has clearly learnt from some of his other mistakes. Gone is the insult-throwing madman who governed largely by decree and dismissed critics as “vaselined baboons”; in his place is “a soft-spoken technocrat” who, in the run-up to October’s midterms, wants to retain the support of the moderates who backed him in 2023. Perhaps he has finally realised that chainsaws may be useful for “slaying inflationary dragons”, but if he wants Argentina (and his political career) to prosper in the long term, he’ll need some allies.