2023-11-23 18:17:53
Both are direct, emphatic and sometimes ribald. Both evoke a return to past glories and were built from the media with a visceral hatred of the left and politicians. Still, equating Javier Milei with Donald Trump may be a bit of a stretch.
The Argentine Milei, in his words the “first liberal libertarian president in the history of Humanity”, is, to a certain extent, a local expression of a global current and is for this reason often compared to former US president Donald Trump.
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Both cultivate the mythology of the “outsider”, they became famous thanks to television and belong to a new far-right that has other representatives in Jair Bolsonaro, former president of Brazil, and the Vox party of Spain.
For all this, Milei, a 53-year-old economist, is often described as “mini-Trump” or “Trump of the Pampas” to describe him in a nutshell.
But Milei’s victory on Sunday with 55% of the votes is deeply rooted in local circumstances: anti-Peronism and the revision of the narrative about the dictatorship. But, above all, the economy.
“There is a family resemblance, without a doubt, but it is a mistake to simply subsume them to the same movement, without taking into account local particularities,” Gabriel Vommaro, a doctor in sociology and political analyst, told AFP.
For this reason, Michael Shifter, a researcher at the Inter-American Dialogue think tank, based in Washington, also estimated that comparing them is “a bit forced,” because Milei is a product “of the depth of the Argentine crisis and the generalized desperation that people feel.” ”.
Milei’s uniqueness
Argentina, which is going through its worst crisis in 20 years, with annualized inflation of 143% and 40% poverty, voted decisively for the candidate who promised a radical change in the economic model.
To explain his victory, analyst Carlos Germano thinks that, despite the fact that Milei has a right-wing speech, we should not focus so much on ideology but on the “fatigue and lack of predictability” that Argentines suffer.
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Furthermore, Vommaro highlighted that “Milei is really an emerging anti-establishment”, unlike Trump and Bolsonaro, and recalled that in Congress he only has the third minority.
Trump won the presidency and governed the United States from 2016 to 2020 alongside the traditional Republican party.
Bolsonaro had been a deputy for a couple of decades and also became president with the support of “established actors in politics,” the expert added.
But mostly, “Milei is a libertarian, and Trump is the furthest thing from a libertarian you can imagine,” Shifter said.
For the Argentine president-elect, the free market should determine all commercial relations, while Trump was a nationalist who defended protectionism and local industry.
Finally, neither Trump nor Bolsonaro went as far as advocating the elimination of the State in the economic sphere and “dynamiting” the Central Bank, which for Milei is “a mechanism by which politicians defraud Argentines.”
Opportunistic cultural battle
Social networks and the so-called “cultural battle” that is fought there, and that gained relevance during the Trump era, catapulted Milei’s popularity.
The “cultural battle” is an ideological conflict on issues such as feminism, decriminalization of abortion, LGBT+ rights and sexual education. In this debate, the right considers itself a defeated minority in the name of “political correctness” and vindicates its right to a supposedly lost freedom of expression.
Although “Milei is an ally and in his coalition there are central actors in this global cultural battle,” the issue “is not something central to his speech,” Vommaro highlighted.
However, he does “participate in this opportunistically, because he realizes that there is an opportunity to represent sectors that lacked political voice,” added the analyst.
For example, the conservative influencer Agustín Laje, author of books on the subject such as “The Cultural Battle”, is one of Milei’s ideological advisors and went on stage with him at the closing of the campaign.
There Laje said that the new government will seek to plebiscite the abortion law and “remove all the progressivism of the State, that is, the gender ministries, the diversities, the ‘dumb’ feminists.” [corruptas]the LGBT lobbies…”.
Nostalgia and greatness
The nostalgic look at the past is also commonplace in Trump and Milei.
Milei vindicates Juan Bautista Alberdi, father of the Argentine Constitution in the 19th century, whom the libertarian perceives as the inspirer of the country’s first economic development.
“Today we embrace freedom to once again be a world power,” Milei declared in his victory speech.
And Trump congratulated him with a version of his motto “Make America Great Again,” telling him: “Make Argentina great again.”
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