Javier Milei He leans his forehead against the Wailing Wall. He is still, so rooted in that position that it would even seem as if his head were exerting force to tear down the last standing wall of the ancient temple of Jerusalem. He has both of his hands raised and supported, at the height of his face, against the wall. With one of his he grabs Axel Wahnish, who is his rabbi and future ambassador to Israel, although in truth he is much, much more than that. One minute and ten seconds later the President turns. All the cameras in the country capture him inconsolable crying. But only the few around him get to hear what he says next. “I did it, I did it.”
What was Milei talking about? What did she do? Maybe it has to do with the beginning of everything: the day that, in the last stretch of the 2020 pandemic, the “One” appeared to him to reveal that he had “a mission”, which was none other than jumping into politics to defeat the “evil”, that is, socialism. Everything that came next was done with the deep certainty that the plan that God had drawn up, with whom he was convinced that he could speak thanks to the connection that his dead dog “opened” to him, included winning the Presidency in 2023. Perhaps the only thing that was not in the original plans was the birth of his passion for Judaism, although both stories are closely linked.
The truth is that, from minute zero of the libertarian adventure, the mystical, the supernatural, the religious and the political are one thing, inseparable from each other. The trip to Israel, with inconsolable crying and the metaphor of Moses’ anger that he used to intimidate the opposition, They are just another chapter of this biblical story.
Milei believes her sister is Moses and that he is chosen by God. And he will rule as if he had a central place in the middle of a mystical battle between Good and Evil.
Prophecy.
The President is aware that there are certain things that are better kept private, facts in which he believes with deep conviction but which, if he said them, could go down badly. Or, as he told former friends in Creole, They might think “he’s crazy.”
Although sometimes he is on the verge of going off the deep end – like when he told Luis Novaresio that “God exists, very powerful things have happened to me that exceed all scientific explanation”or when he wrote in one of his articles that “Conan ventured to the limits of the impossible and beyond as well,” or when he asserted that “the One was libertarian and the State the invention of the evil one,” or when her sister, the day before the elections, shared on her Instagram account that “God had already assured victory” – Milei tries to impose limits on herself in public. In private, of course, he is much more honest.
In 2021, in a meeting with rabbis organized by the leaders Carlos Maslatón and Gastón Alberdi, The libertarian maintained to the great surprise of the religious present that his sister “was Moses.” In 2023, in a meeting that one of the big textile businessmen organized with other leaders of the industry, the then candidate cut off the machine gun of questions that were asked about specific topics of a possible government of his, saying that all of this “had to be discussed with Kari.” When one of them retorted that it was he and not his sister who would be president if he won the elections, the response he gave left several people cold. “You don’t understand: she is Moses.”
There are dozens of anecdotes in this sense. But in the last stretch of last year one was repeated quite a bit. It happened when different interlocutors – politicians, businessmen and also priests of the Church – recommended Milei avoid the gigantic international controversy that would entail moving the embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The President, who despite his outbursts is cordial when it comes to hand-to-hand treatment, listened to them all. And to some he answered something they never thought they would hear. “It’s just something David asked me for, he told me in a dream.”
In public Milei resorted, once again, to his practice of telling the reality that he perceives but a little more suitable for all audiences. When she was asked in interviews about the reasons for the move – something she rectified again on the trip to Israel – she responded that it was because “David established Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.”
Chosen.
At this intersection is where a gap opens to enter the President’s deepest thoughts. A first reading, almost linear, would point once again to the mystical: according to Jewish tradition, the messiah would be a descendant of David, the second king of Israel, who also, like Milei, had been directly selected by God. In that logic, the reference makes perfect sense.
A second analysis would look at the emotional state of the President, and at the question that returns time and time again about whether he distinguishes reality from what is happening inside his head, or if he really thinks that David speaks to him in his dreams, that his dog Conan did not die but went to sit “next to the One” or that, as he said in Davos, there is an imminent threat from communism against the Western world.
However, another aspect is even more striking. It is empirical verification that Milei makes decisions based on his mystical beliefs. Unlike what he says, that Your “spiritual life is your private matter.” -as he answered to the Spanish newspaper El País when they asked him if it was true that he spoke to his dead dog via a medium-, the religious and esoteric merge with the political. The case of the embassy move highlights this, although he is far from the only one. In 2021, after his political debut, his entire campaign team insisted on running for the leadership of the Buenos Aires Government in the incoming national elections, something that he rejected because “The One” had told him that “in 2023” he would be President. Even the formation of his Cabinet was guided by the hand of God, a logic that he had also used in the past to form La Libertad Avanza. “El Uno told me that you are part of the ‘mission,’” Caputo told “Toto” to finish convincing him to be his Minister of Economy.
In the references to David there is a final revelation. Perhaps it is the most important for these times. It’s about how far Judaism penetrated Milei’s head. And to what extent his rabbi influences him.
Guide.
Wahnish cried moved next to the President. Although the focus was on the libertarian, he also had his own debt to God. In 2021, his wife almost died when she was giving birth to one of his children. At that moment, the then unknown Orthodox rabbi of the Judeo-Moroccan community asked God to save them so that he could live “at least for a while in Israel,” as revealed by the media Mishpacha, in an extensive profile it did about him.
It was in that context where Wahnish and Milei met in mid-2021. As this magazine already reported, there was a kind of “prophecy” in that meeting – which was going to last a few minutes but lasted two hours – in which it was pointed out that The libertarian “would lead a liberation movement in Argentina.” Perhaps Wahnish struck Milei’s messianic chord, aware that just a few months before, at the end of 2020, he said he had been entrusted with “the mission.” Maybe not. The truth is that from that meeting the economist, who was 51 years old and had lived a life as a practicing Catholic, came away with the idea of converting to Judaism.
Again several readings appear. Facundo Milman points out how Judaism knows how to have a long tradition of supposed messiahs, and that it is also no coincidence that the branch that Milei leaned towards, that of Chabad Lubavitch, which always had an inclination towards anti-communism. Then there is the libertarian’s own biography, who carries a terrible life, in which he suffered family violence and bullying: Wahnish and Milei established a deep spiritual but also personal connection, and the rabbi included him as one of his family and invited to his home several times. Could Judaism be the perfect excuse that the President found to be, once and for all, included in something? Or, as several in his circle wonder, has the connection with the “One” that he believed Conan and his medium sister provide him now evolved into his approach to something more institutional, such as the Jewish religion?
Although there are more questions than answers, the truth is that Judaism fit perfectly with Milei’s messianic vocation, which he even used as a metaphor, after the fall of the Omnibus Law, a very harsh passage from the Old Testament in which Moses ordered a mass murder of “traitors”. The thing is that for “el Loco”, the nickname that accompanied him all his life, there are no grays. There is only black and white. Allies and enemies.
The forces of Heaven.
Milei’s vision is, then, theological. From a vision where there is a supreme being who orders everything, he thinks that his path to politics was ordered by “the One”, that his followers are part of the “good” Argentines – he calls them like a phrase from the book of the Maccabees- or that the market, like God, “has no faults.” “His economic reading of Argentine history and the complicated current situation of the country is inserted into a larger cosmological vision that includes ‘forces of heaven’, the ‘One’, extraordinary intermediaries (Conan, his sister Karina) who help him. to fulfill the divine legacy of making the forces of Good (libertarian capitalism) triumph over those of Evil (statism and communism engendered by the Evil One). Milei is not ‘like’ a prophet: he believes himself to be a prophet,” says Conicet researcher Alejandro Frigerio.
This peculiar way of seeing the world can cause big problems, it is clear. That is what many people who experienced their “faith” up close think. Mariano Fernández, an economist at UCEMA, was one of his few friends. After the appearance of God in Milei’s life he ended up distancing himself, and now he shares this reflection. “I have heard things that worried me. She said that she had a mission that was sent down to her from Heaven, and the dogs had a role in that. Javier already had little problems, but in recent years I noticed scary behaviors. He is quite crazy.”
Now “the Fool” is in power. And Argentina is an obligatory part of his mystical journey, which in the President’s head merges with the political adventure until they are the same thing.. It remains to be seen, then, what kind of messianic leader he will be.. According to Jewish tradition there are two: Messiah Ben Yosef, the one who brings disaster, and Messiah Ben David, the one who brings salvation. Which one will be Milei?
