He is rude, foul-mouthed, and one of the most popular politicians in the world. Like it or not, Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding president is the new face of populism.
October 2024
In February 2019, the economist, television personality, and author Javier Milei made a splash at the Buenos Aires Comic-Con by showing up in the black-and-gold costume of his alter ego, the anarchocapitalist superhero “General Ancap.” As “El General,” Milei cursed “Keynesians” and “collectivists” while profanely vowing to kick them out of Argentina. The anarchocapitalist branding, the rude tone, the obscenities, and the underlying message of hostility toward elites were basic features of Milei’s political character. Four years and nine months later, Argentines elected him president with almost 57 percent of the vote in a runoff.
Born in Buenos Aires in 1970, Milei earned several degrees in economics and taught and researched the subject (he has published dozens of academic papers) before gaining popularity in his forties as a guest on various television programs in Argentina. He was impolite, foul-mouthed, and colorful as he trained a libertarian lens on various political and economic issues. His social-media popularity grew, and he won election to Congress in November 2021.
His November 2023 triumph over more conventional opponent Sergio Massa (a former finance minister) came as a surprise — Milei had finished almost seven percentage points (or about 1.8 million votes) behind Massa in the first round. As of 1 October 2024, President Milei’s 61 percent public-approval rating on Morning Consult’s tracker put him in a tie with Mexico’s ex-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador for second place behind India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the best-liked politician in the world.
Hostile observers see Milei’s meteoric rise as symptomatic of new political trends including social media’s ubiquity, a cultural backlash against political correctness, the emergence of political misogyny, and new interest in leaders with autocratic, “far-right,” or even fascist tendencies. Others argue that Argentina’s new president is reviving longstanding political discussions about the role of populist discourse and the conflicts between liberalism and social justice.
In truth, Milei is hard to label. He differs from other global leaders with whom he is typically compared, and he cannot be slotted neatly into the usual ideological categories. What is at the heart of Milei’s politics, and what lies behind his rise as political leader? To answer these questions, we must look to the sources of his political and economic thought, and understand how that thought interacts with his appeals to populism in contemporary Argentina.
Intellectual Inspiration
In a 2017 academic paper, Milei and a pair of coauthors assessed Argentina’s economy as showing “a serious problem of competitiveness,” with currency devaluation certain to come. “In a frank complicity between politicians and Keynesians,” they went on, “the most vulnerable sectors of society will be punished, so that ‘the caste’ which has taken power continues to enjoy its enormous privileges.”
Milei has spent many hours studying the ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) and his famous 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Milei is not an admirer. In the 2017 essay, he and his coauthors find the ideas of Keynes about government’s role as a force for economic stability and growth to be “bad influences that extend to this day, and which have caused profound damage to the economy [of Argentina] and its inhabitants.”
Keynes wrote during the Great Depression. Challenging the laissez-faire liberal credo of the time, he advocated for the state’s active involvement in the economy. Thus, his General Theory is often seen as putting forth a key challenge to the idea of free-market economies. In Keynesian economics, government intervention is justified and desired to boost job creation, to avoid inflation (with taxes being the means), and to stimulate the economy during recessions via lowered interest rates. Keynesians commonly advocate an independent central bank to assist in these tasks (the United States had established one in 1913, and Argentina chartered its own in 1935, the year before Keynes’s book appeared). Much economic literature sees Keynes as having paved the way for the social-welfare states that emerged following the Second World War.
Milei first read Keynes in graduate school, and as the candidate told the Economist in September 2023, was “disappointed by the errors and lack of solid economic explanations.” Milei has disdained Keynesian ideas ever since. But his opposition went beyond mere intellectual disagreement and became part of a political reaction against specific regulations and policies that dominated the twentieth century.
By the time Milei encountered it in the 1990s, Keynesianism had long been the rule of thumb for national governments facing economic crises and recessions. States actively intervened to create jobs, enlarge the workforce, and expand social services in housing, health care, schooling, and so on. The Keynesian economic formula called for “more [state] intervention, not less.”
An earlier Argentine who encountered Keynesianism was an army colonel named Juan Perón (1895–1974). A member of the military junta that seized power in a 1943 coup, Perón became the coupmakers’ minister of labor and began enacting social reforms (such as decrees mandating better working conditions) that drew the support of labor unions to him. After rivals unseated and jailed him in 1945, a mass movement hit the streets to successfully demand his quick release. In February 1946, Perón parlayed his worker-socialist support into a 53.7 percent victory in the presidential election. His Justicialist Party, founded later that year, quickly put Keynesian-style government intervention at the core of economic policy. The welfare state and the labor movement burgeoned.
But the “Age of Keynes” began to crumble amid an inflationary crisis triggered by irresponsible state interventions. Just as the General Theory had challenged the classical-liberal thought of Adam Smith (1723–90) and David Ricardo (1772–1823), new thinkers began to oppose government interference in the economy. Anti-Keynesianism spread in the 1970s and a Keynes-critical school of thought later known as neoliberalism, gained momentum. Of the writers from this school, two especially influenced the young Javier Milei: Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) and Milton Friedman (1912–2006).
Hayek was among Keynesianism’s most fierce and persistent critics. In his view, the free market — not the state — should be the economy’s key actor. Skeptical of state intervention, he rejected central planning and argued that the welfare state and its social policies clashed with higher values such as individualism, private property, and personal freedom.
Friedman and colleagues at the University of Chicago such as Theodore Schultz, George Stigler, Gary Becker, and Robert Lucas laid out similar analyses. They echoed Hayek’s concerns about individual freedom and called for the deregulation of markets and the privatization of services. By the 1980s, as the Cold War was nearing its end, the appeals of the “Chicago School” were heard by economic superpowers. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) and U.S. president Ronald Reagan (1981–89) implemented the neoliberal model in their countries. Milei calls Thatcher “one of the great leaders of humanity.”
To a lesser degree, Argentina also felt this change of direction. Driven into exile in 1955, Perón returned in 1973 and was reelected to the presidency in a 62 percent landslide. He died the following year, however, and a military junta took over. Its eight-year rule would see some shy forays into neoliberal economic policy, though the regime’s main focus was its “dirty war” — a sustained campaign of bloody state terrorism against critics and opponents. In 1982, the flagging junta tried to help its own prospects by getting into another war — this time against Thatcher-led Britain over the Falkland Islands. That fight lasted just ten weeks; the junta lost.
Civilian democratic rule returned in 1983, and it was only then, and especially after the 1989 election of President Carlos Saúl Menem (1930–2021), that neoliberal policies really caught on. Milei hails Menem’s decade-long administration as the “best government in Argentina’s history” and celebrates the greater market freedom and wave of privatizations that Menem oversaw.
Milei’s drawing of inspiration from Friedman, Hayek, Menem, Reagan, and Thatcher does not exhaust his ideological complexity, however. To more fully unravel and trace the skeins that make up his political thought and appeal, one must look further to the right, toward libertarian and anarchocapitalist theories.
Perhaps the single most important intellectual influence on Milei is Murray Rothbard (1926–95), a U.S. political thinker closely associated with the “Austrian School” of economics and the father of anarchocapitalism and paleolibertarianism. Rothbard “argued for the abolition of the state in favor of completely free markets,” believed in strict monetary policies, and fiercely opposed central banking.
In 2013, Milei read Rothbard and adopted his self-identification as an “anarchocapitalist.” Milei wanted Argentina to get rid of its central bank and reduce government to a minimum. But Rothbard was more than an economic theorist; his writings purvey an extreme right-wing ideology.
In 1992, Rothbard published a manifesto of sorts in which he called for a “right-wing populist program” to “concentrate on dismantling the crucial existing areas of State and elite rule, and on liberating the average American from the most flagrant and oppressive features of that rule.” Rothbard wanted to abolish taxes (especially income taxes), the welfare system, the Federal Reserve Board, and affirmative action, among other things, while upholding family values and replacing state control with parental control.
Rothbard knew that the state would have to be imploded — collapsed from within. He understood that the future of the paleolibertarian movement was not in the hands of activists or grassroots movements. Instead, in his 1992 manifesto he envisioned a presidential candidate, “someone whom all wings of anti-Establishment rightists can get behind.” In Rothbard’s view, this right-wing populist should “rouse the masses of people against the elites that are looting them, and confusing them, and oppressing them, both socially and economically.” Years later, that was precisely what one of his intellectual followers would achieve in Argentina.
The Populist Formula
During a presidential-campaign rally in La Plata, Javier Milei hefted a chainsaw that he said he would use to chop social programs, cut government spending, and slash all the privileges of the “political caste” that had ruined the country. The chainsaw became the symbol of Milei’s political agenda, conveying a message not just about government waste and excess, but also about the larger struggle pitting the elite against the people in Argentina.
The appeal to “the people” against “the elite” is a hallmark of populism. But as Jan-Werner Müller explains, it is not enough to criticize the elite to be a populist — rather, populists must also “claim that they and they alone represent the people, all other political competitors are essentially illegitimate.” Milei speaks of both the people and the political caste as homogeneous entities. This helps him to “develop an understanding of a political caste that includes all political parties and defines them as thieves, privileged, corrupt, and parasites that use the super-powers of the state to live comfortably at the expense of the citizens.” Argentina, for Milei, is a country badly governed by a broken political elite; he alone, an outsider with a mandate from the people, can overturn the corrupt status quo.
Like other populist leaders, Milei favors an “excessively demonstrative and ‘colorful’ attitude, that opposes the ‘high’ rigid behavior of the common establishment.” He describes opponents in obscene terms, and has called left-wing Colombian president Gustavo Petro a “terrorist murderer.” Milei’s anger at the political class is grounded in public frustration with Argentina’s very serious economic and political problems. The Argentine peso was the second most devalued currency in 2023, and the country runs an annual inflation rate of 140 percent. Forty percent of Argentines live in poverty.
For a populist, crisis is fertile ground. Milei’s rhetoric of urgency was key to his winning campaign. Once he took office, he doubled down on alarmism, warning in his year-end address that “unless we do what is necessary — now — we are heading for an economic catastrophe of a magnitude unknown to any living Argentine.” Having rung the bell of national emergency, Milei has leaned into zero-sum messaging and binary logic. Publicly, at least, he has reduced what was in fact a complex decision spectrum to a set of stark choices between prosperity and failure, progress and catastrophe, change and “more of the same,” and Milei and the political caste.
Milei relied on one more thing to bring him triumph: social media. Since winning his congressional seat in 2021, he had used social networks and “unconventional logics of communication” to position himself as a patriotic savior and lion of the people. His running mate, Victoria Villaruel, and right-wing intellectuals such as Agustin Laje used social-media outreach to generate support among the young. Daughter of a military officer, Villaruel has high-profile conservative opinions and has questioned the number of people who were “disappeared” by the dictatorship.
Milei has been identified as a classic populist and is often compared to other right-wing politicians such as former U.S. president Donald Trump, Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, unsuccessful Chilean presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, and former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. While Milei does resemble them in style and rhetoric, he is not without his own political particularities.
Unresolved Questions
Milei’s political program and populist rhetoric are flip sides of the same coin. Through a libertarian and anarchocapitalist conceptual framework, he used populist discourse to persuade voters to endorse his vision of what he called, in his 2023 year-end speech, “a limited State, which will act in defense of the life, liberty and property of Argentines.” The themes of his administration and the values that he stresses — life, liberty, property, individualism — set him apart from the leftists whom he dismisses as “Keynesians” and “collectivists.” His position on the right side of the political spectrum is strengthened by his intellectual affinity with Rothbard and his political closeness to Villaruel and Laje (like the vice-president, Laje attempts to minimize the number of victims whom the military dictatorship killed).
Milei is effusively cheered by rightists and libertarians in other countries. The Spanish political party Vox and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele praise him, as does the famous entrepreneur and Trump supporter Elon Musk. In light of all this, some observers claim that Milei belongs to a wave of “right-wing populists with authoritarian sympathies.”
While it is true that Milei shares the views of other far-right politicians when it comes to gun rights or the climate-change denial, as regards a number of “culture war” issues he takes positions different from theirs. Milei has openly said that neither he — nor the government — should be concerned with voluntary, adult sex work, drug use, transsexuality, or immigration, all of which he thinks are matters of personal choice. As an advocate of the minimal state, he wants government to concern itself with security and justice, and nothing else.
Milei’s libertarian position brings him closer to Hayek’s “ultra-individualist” conception and makes him skeptical of any kind of authority that may be imposed on the citizen. In his September 2023 Economist interview, he made it clear that individuals should be free to migrate, take drugs, or change genders, but should not expect the government to pay the bill. As Hayek himself stressed, libertarianism is not conservatism.
Theoretical matters aside, pressures from power groups and his own voters may lead Milei to adopt conservative policies that bring him closer into line with the far right. Signs of this can be seen in his prohibitions of inclusive language and gender perspectives in official documents. In December 2023, his security minister announced that measures would be taken against protests that block streets. Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), is not an established formation but rather a coalition formed to win the 2023 election. It holds only seven seats in the 72-member Senate (or thirteen if we count the allied Republican Proposal party). In the 257-member Chamber of Deputies, LLA holds forty seats (or 85 if allied parties are counted). Milei is well aware that with nothing close to a majority in Congress, he must maintain legitimacy with the voters who put him into office, many more of whom are conventional conservatives (or far-rightists) than Rothbard-reading anarchocapitalists. If Milei does shift into a more common type of right-of-center policy mix, it would not be the first time that Realpolitik will have bent a candidate’s ideology to be something other than it once was.
Daniel Torres Checa is an Attorney at Law and a Human Rights scholar at The London School of Economics and Political Science.
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Tomas Cuesta/Getty Images
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