The Argentine presidential contender isn’t another Latin American Trump; he’s a free-market populist confronting his country’s statism-driven failures.
The Argentine presidential contender isn’t another Latin American Trump; he’s a free-market populist confronting his country’s statism-driven failures.
O n Sunday, firebrand economist Javier Milei won nearly a third of Argentina’s presidential-primary voters, placing him in the lead ahead of the elections set to take place in October. English-speaking media outlets have been taken aback by this development in what was once a reliably center-left Latin American democracy. The AP has dubbed Milei a Trump-admiring “right-wing populist” akin to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Bloomberg News has similarly accused this “Trump-like candidate” of disturbing markets, and the BBC concluded its coverage with the jarring memory of Bolsonaro supporters storming the congress in Brasilia. This is the latest attempt to brand a broad range of right-wing populists, often donning eccentric hairstyles, as the “next Trumps” of their respective countries. It proves especially reductionist in the case of Milei, whose rise can only be understood as a consequence of Argentina’s unique predicament.
As I have written elsewhere, Argentina suffers from extreme and chronic economic mismanagement, its private sector shackled by extensive price controls, prohibitively high taxes, onerous regulations, and irresponsible macroeconomic policies. Two decades of political hegemony by the left-wing Justicialist Party, only briefly interrupted by the center-right Macri administration between 2015 and 2019, are now culminating in catastrophe. This March, inflation rose above 100 percent for the first time in decades, showing no signs of slowing down. Accordingly, the currency has depreciated spectacularly. On December 10, 2019, when current president Alberto Fernández was inaugurated, one U.S. dollar was officially worth 60 Argentine pesos. That figure rose to a staggering 287 last weekend, less than four years later. While Milei’s primary victory prompted the central bank to further devalue the currency, down to 350 pesos per dollar, Argentina’s official exchange rate continues to understate the problem, since dollars had been unofficially trading for more than 400 pesos as early as April. Moreover, Argentina saw no real GDP per capita growth between 2008 and 2022, and its debt-to-GDP ratio has nearly doubled since 2011.
Milei’s appeal comes primarily from his zealous commitment to free-market economics, and in this regard, he is far more extreme than Donald Trump. He plans to abolish the central bank and dollarize the money supply, slash government spending more sharply than even the International Monetary Fund recommends, abolish eleven of Argentina’s 17 government ministries, and embrace unfettered free trade. His populist vitriol is not aimed at a vaguely defined cultural elite, but at a “political caste” of corrupt and statist politicians who have failed to deliver economic prosperity. To take one such example, former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner currently serves as vice president, in part, to guarantee her immunity from punishment for crimes committed during her time as president.
While Milei has also dabbled in cultural and social issues, these have never been his driving force. For instance, he only recently articulated his opposition to abortion, and his defense of organ markets on libertarian grounds shows that he is hardly a committed social conservative. If Trump represented a shift away from neoliberal conservatism, sacrificing markets in favor of economic nationalism, then Milei embodies the return of Reagan and Thatcher with a vengeance, uninhibited, as those figures were not, by any kind of commitment to institutional legacy. His central promise is to empower Argentines to be “the architects of their own destiny.”
Perhaps even more critically, his relationship to Argentine history and institutions is radically different from those of his more authoritarian counterparts, such as Bukele and Bolsonaro. While Bukele famously broke into El Salvador’s congress with armed soldiers to intimidate congressmen to approve his legislative agenda, Milei has emphasized the importance of division of powers and intends to overcome congressional gridlock through nonbinding referenda and other democratic forms of political pressure. Bolsonaro was notoriously sympathetic toward Brazil’s military regime, going so far as to memorialize the 1964 coup against elected president João Goulart with a military parade in 2020. By contrast, Milei has openly condemned the crimes of Argentina’s late-20th-century military regime. To him, Argentina’s greatest president was Carlos Menem, whose democratic government was instead controversial for pursuing large-scale privatizations and a strict currency peg to the U.S. dollar in the 1990s.
Milei’s portrayal in American media exemplifies a growing tendency to fall into a binary caricature of right-wing politics, pitting a bland, compromising, and institutionalist center-right against a populist, fundamentalist, and authoritarian far-right. This paradigm fundamentally misunderstands the motivations of most Argentines who voted for Milei and tends to overly stigmatize an admittedly extreme manifestation of a very real demand for economic reform, while trivializing far more pernicious political movements in the region.