Javier Milei: The Anti-Perón

SAN CARLOS DE BARILOCHE, Bariloche for short, is a town in the northwest of Patagonia close to the Chilean border. The ‘Angel of Death’ Josef Mengele, SS officer and physician who conducted experiments on the inmates of Birkenau, was said to love Bariloche because it reminded him of the Alps. Journalists and Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal chased men and phantoms there even as the Israelis picked up Eichmann near Buenos Aires in 1960. It was not a safe venture; locals were hostile, people disappeared for asking too many questions. Bariloche was, and is, a little Germany of unrepentant souls. It is but one such place, the legacy of Juan Perón who had welcomed Nazis fleeing Europe with open arms. For non-Argentines, it eclipsed his other legacy—as the godfather of populism.

For Argentines, the economy is a terminal disease. Only one thing is worse—and that’s the cure. In 2001, Argentina became the country with the largest ever sovereign debt default at $80 billion. In 2014, it defaulted for a second time. After winning the run-off, President-elect Javier Milei, the libertarian, ‘anarcho-capitalist’ economist, and chainsaw-wielding TikTok star, announced: “Today begins Argentina’s reconstruction. Today begins the end of Argentina’s decline. The model of decadence has come to an end. There is no way back. Argentina will return to its place in the world that it should never have lost.”

That’s a tall order even if he blows up the central bank to tackle the 140 per cent-plus inflation as he has promised. It might be easier for Donald Trump to ship some merchandise to Buenos Aires since MAGA would work just as well for Make Argentina Great Again. Milei wants to discard the peso for the US dollar. And the proposal is backed by almost 40 per cent of the electorate. However, the peso had already been pegged one-to-one with the dollar under the convertibility plan of 1991. The hyperinflation of the 1970s and 1980s had eroded trust in the local currency, begetting the long Argentine love for the greenback. It worked well for a while but not in the long run as the economy became hostage to what happened in the US. Disaster struck in 2001 when the catastrophic meltdown made all the money in Argentina worthless.

Enter Néstor Kirchner in 2003. He solved the crisis with a dose of leftwing Peronism so tailor-made that it acquired the moniker Kirchnerismo (Kirchnerism).

Eventually, Kirchnerism turned into an overdose under his successor, wife and then widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and caused the second sovereign debt default a decade on. Coupled with the corruption of Fernández’s presidency, Argentina took a chance with Mauricio Macri in 2015, a market-loving conservative who began turning an economic basket case around but in the end his austerity measures proved too much for a land fertilised by Peronism.

Milei will find governing as difficult as an attempt to define Peronism or categorise its strands. In its unadulterated version, Peronism is the closest the world has come to leftwing fascism—a mixture of ‘national socialism’ and welfarism. Except Argentina’s brutal military junta, hardly any civilian leader has been free from it—certainly not after Carlos Menem successfully repositioned the Peronist Justicialist Party (PJ) on the right in the 1990s, only for the Kirchners to pull it back to the left. Argentina never shook off Perón’s long shadow. It never really wanted to. But that’s precisely what Milei has promised. Again, there’s little here that’s new.

Argentina did not fall in the last 20 or 40 years. It fell a century ago when South America’s most socially progressive, prosperous, and immigrant-friendly nation ceased to be the second most-sought-after destination for Europeans looking for a fresh start because of its bad politics and worse economics. Milei will find cutting state expenditure and firing government employees hard despite the overwhelming vote from an electorate desperate for anything that might work. He has been pragmatic enough to bury the hatchet with political rivals whenever it has suited him. But his choice of Victoria Villarruel—an apologist for the junta—for his vice president, his plans to ban abortion, and his downplaying of the junta’s crimes are more than a threat of socio-political regression. It’s a thin line between that and Argentina’s reputation as a safe haven for mass murderers and their descendants.

On paper, Milei’s election looks like the farthest Argentines are willing to walk from Peronism. But will they walk away from it altogether?

ArgentinaelectionsJavier MileiPeronist Justicialist Partypoliticspopulismradical change