“Long live freedom, damn it!” Sunday evening, Javier Milei was jubilant in front of his party activists after a victory that seemed to surprise him even. While he was credited by the polls with 20% of the votes in the primaries to designate the protagonists of the next presidential election, the anti-system candidate obtained more than 30% of the votes. The traditional right candidate, Patricia Bullrich, won 28% of the vote with the mayor of Buenos Aires Horacio Larreta, ahead of the candidate of the ruling Peronist coalition, Sergio Massa, the current Minister of Economy (27%) . This is the first time that these primaries have been so tight, announcing great uncertainty for the presidential election on October 22.
Sergio Massa’s third position should come as no surprise. The economic results of Peronist President Alberto Fernandez are catastrophic. Inflation exceeds 100% annually, recession threatens. “Exports have fallen, in particular because of the drought and this puts our economy in a worrying situation, analyzes economist Luis Palma Cane. Milei’s economic plans create great uncertainty. He wants to dollarize the Argentine economy and abolish the central bank. This weighs negatively on the economy and causes the obligation to devalue the peso again.” The failure of the Peronist mandate of Alberto Fernandez follows the more than mixed results of the mandate of the right-wing president Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), who contributed to seriously re-indebting the country, without the social situation of the Argentines being affected. find an advantage.
“The big surprise is that Javier Milei won by having only a very small political apparatus, explains Marcelo Bermolen, director of the institutional quality observatory of the Universidad Austral. David won against Goliath. Society is tired of this political class that has no answer to its problems. The company is waiting for new proposals. It is a clear rejection of Peronism, but also of the right-wing coalition Juntos por el cambio of Mauricio Macri.”
Javier Milei burst into the political arena two years ago when he was elected deputy for the city of Buenos Aires. With his abundant, cleverly messy brown hair à la Boris Johnson, his sideburns and his blue eyes, he quickly stood out on the Argentinian media scene. He is a good customer for talk shows, never stingy with a shock formula, immediately relayed by social networks. He said in his campaign launch video: “Tremble, politicians. Keep lying to people, gangs of delinquents, thieves. You don’t like our plan… It’s because you’re not going to be able to fly anymore, you’re going to have to work like honest people.” He castigates the political class in power, calling it a caste. He wants to restore Argentina to “world power” status, a kind of “Make Argentina Great Again” in the vein of former US President Donald Trump.
Javier Milei is in the libertarian movement, believing that the state must be reduced to its minimum to leave freedom to citizens and economic initiatives. He defends the freedom to sell arms. He wants to liberalize the sale of organs. His thirst for freedom stops when it comes to abortion. He wants to come back to the law passed in 2020 which gave women free access to voluntary termination of pregnancy. He claims his affinities with former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
His ideas meet with a favorable echo in the Argentinian right. The Juntos por el cambio candidate, who came second in the primary, affirms her sympathy for Javier Milei. “He defended good ideas,” she said on the TN television channel. Small hitch in his campaign: he was accused of selling candidate positions to finance his campaign. But in a country where a senior Peronist official has been seen throwing sacks of cash over a convent gate to evade tax audits, it takes more to stir public opinion.
“The company is waiting for new proposals. Javier Milei responds to the population’s need for novelty but he has no experience and will not have a parliamentary majority, ”says Marcelo Bermolen. It is especially young people who have mobilized for Milei. Young people only knew Macri and Peronism, Fernandez version. For them, both have failed. They are pragmatic. They vote for a new proposal. Society has clearly made the choice, during this primary of the new policy against the old policy. It remains to be confirmed during the presidential election on October 22.
