2023-12-08 17:33:16
Javier Miley has made the fastest leap from political Olympism in memory: from television talk shows to the Argentine Executive non-stop. The world observes him as if he were in the center of a hall of mirrors that reflect different faces with which he is usually associated: Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Santiago Abascal. When seeing these projections, analysts do not agree: What is their own or foreign? Where has its uniqueness resided?
The three have greeted with enthusiasm the victory of the candidate of Freedom Advances. In fact, the former president of Brazil and the leader of Vox will be in his inauguration. Sometimes, Milei is more like one than the other and perhaps this is due to the affinities that are also sometimes manifested in Hungarian. Viktor Orban, another of the guests at the Buenos Aires festivities this Sunday. He shares with them and Trump himself, who has promised a soon visit, a look at the world.
The former soccer goalkeeper and former rock singer has achieved the electoral miracle with a rhetoric known in the United States, Europe and Brazil: the repudiation of the State and its bureaucracy and the abandonment of all loopholes of political correctness. His indignant, theatrical, unfiltered tone resonated deeply with part of a disbelieving society hit by the crisis. It would not have been possible without television and telephone screens.
On his way to the White House, the tycoon Trump had a television show, The Apprentice. Bolsonaro was imitated on television by an actor surrounded by dwarfs who represented Bolsonabo. Milei lent himself to theater and comedy seasoned with a radical economic program. The Brazilian essayist Marcia Tiburi tried to analyze this phenomenon based on the figure of the former Army captain. The result of her investigation has been captured in the book Political ridicule. Tiburi says that ridicule is “that which escapes reason.” Unlike the carnival moment, where social values and hierarchies are inverted in a burlesque key and then recover an order, this new “upside down world” It causes the serious and the non-serious to be confused and mixed, but, at the same time, they remain, they do not dissolve, which allows the language of politics to have reached unknown and to a certain point naturalized limits in Bolsonaro and now Milei. . The Argentine’s voters were not frightened by his proposals to sell organs or children.
Milei’s originality
Not coincidentally, Bolsonaro and his children immediately tuned in to the Argentine economist. The experiences of the two countries are related in to have been able to present as new an old, strongly conservative program that had already failed. However, Milei has added a differential value: her readings of Murray Rothbardthe founder of right-wing libertarianism in the United States and author of The ethics of freedom, a book that he turned into a kind of personal bible. The future Argentine ruler has in turn begun to draw on the teachings of orthodox judaism and aspires to convert to that religion.
Bolsonaro had no qualms about vindicating the 1964 coup d’état, calling it a “revolution,” and turn the military into the backbone of your government. Milei has begun to walk the path of denialism by questioning the nature of the repression of the last dictatorship (1976-83). Unlike Brazil, where a wall of impunity was built, Argentina tried and convicted more than 1,000 soldiers involved in crimes against humanity. As president, the anarcho-capitalist will encounter that political and ethical heritage. Human rights organizations fear not only that a process of historical review but rather that he be in favor of pardoning former officers and non-commissioned officers or lifting their preventive detentions.
From ideology to pragmatism
Trump and Bolsonaro came to power behind a party structure or established alliances that allowed them to have their own weight in national legislatures. The former captain and the most ideological sectors that accompanied him, a good part of that group, enthusiastic readers of Olavo de Carvalho, they wanted to wipe the slate clean for the State and Brazilian politics. They collided on many occasions against the limit that Parliament set for them and They could not privatize the state-owned Petrobras. In critical moments of his administration, Bolsonaro was forced to sign governance agreements and surround himself with professional politicians and pragmatic soldiers. Milei’s foreign policy will also be affected by those needs. His attempts to break with China and Brazil had to be silenced.
Freedom Advances is minority in Congress (it has 37 deputies and seven senators). It lacks provincial governors. Milei has already abandoned anarcho-capitalist “purity.” She has had no choice but to associate with the former right-wing president, Mauricio Macri, and his former rival in the elections, Patricia Bullrich, a supporter of Bolsonarism who, as payment for her support in the second round, was awarded with the Ministry of Security. The men who will manage the economic area and the Central Bank, which she proposed to dynamit, also come from Macrismo.
Unlike what could have happened in the United States or Brazil, Milei inherits a dire economic situation, with almost 45% poor. That number may increase if he delivers on his promise of a drastic tightening and liberalization of prices, which could push inflation beyond 150% annually. The bomba social It is of unpredictable magnitude and capacity for expansion.
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