In December 2023, Javier Milei took office as Argentina’s new President, elected with 55% of the vote, following the inability of the Peronist alliance to provide decent well paid jobs, an affordable cost of living, a stable economy and decent services.
Milei followed the Trump formula of critiquing a corrupt incompetent elite, making bold, outrageous statements and purporting to stand for ‘freedom’, picking on various minority or ‘other’ groups while in reality supporting economic policies that enrich the 1% and further impoverish the many. He also even sports an iconic haircut! This approach is nothing new for capital. It has employed it often, and increasingly does so, as capitalism suffers from a long debilitating crisis of reproduction, going to ever increasing unpopular extremes in order to reproduces and sustain itself as a system. When capitalism is in crisis, the establishment often create and support a perceived ‘anti-establishment’ figure who, in an authoritarian way, implement capital’s regime of unpopular reforms that would be unimaginable previously.
Milei is a dangerous politician easily able to capitalise on the limits and the inability of social democracy, or the centre-left, to move beyond mild reforms that do little to address crippling inequality and economic injustice. Ireland, and Sinn Féin, should take note that tweaking a few policies won’t do it: much more fundamental and significant economic restructuring is required to deliver substantive equality and prevent the ongoing rise of the far-right.
Milei talks about freedom and positions himself as an anti-establishment economist but in truth he is only really interested in the freedom of capital and much more simply aligns to the infamous and powerful ‘Chicago boys’ school of economics, like Milton Friedman and his Chilean cronies, but granted with a more modern tech twist. The major policies he has already implemented reveal a politician who believes in rampant neo-liberal capitalism and an oppressive State willing to clamp down on any opposition and on the freedom of citizens. Milei could well be charting a ‘peaceful road to fascism’, fifty years on from Chile’s violent fascist coup.
Milei has already passed laws to privatise state companies and allow foreign capital and foreign monopolies to purchase state assets. He has also ended all major public works in his push to drastically cut public spending. He has ended limits on exports which will further enrich the business class. He has also changed house and land laws to again allow foreign capital flood the market which will drive process up enrich monopolies and increase inequality. Football clubs can now be bought by foreign capital, something incredibly emotive in Argentina.
He has done away with maternity leave rights, reduced severance entitlements to make it cheaper to fire workers, extended probationary periods and got rid of fines on employers who fair to register workers. He is also limited the constitutional right to strike of unions ahead of efforts he will make to renegotiate collective agreements. He also quickly paid Musk back for his support by changing internet laws to allow Starlink (Musk’s satellite company) in. Contracts (employment or rental for example) can now also be ‘agreed’ to be paid in cryptocurrency, or indeed any commodity such as milk or cows, as Minister Mondino put it.
Protests emerged immediately following these some 360 decrees and these were met with the full brute force of the Argentine police. Milei won’t shirk from using brute force to push through his pro-international capital reforms. What is clear is that Milei is serving the interests, in particular, of international capital, while also enriching exporting business interest locally. Milei is supported by the Atlas Network, a US think tank which promotes globalised free-market capital and ‘freedom champions’ who will shape history. But this presents opportunities for broader alliance of workers, small business, small farmers and vitally the environmental movement (as Milei is also a climate change denier) to emerge in opposition, as we are already beginning to see.
