“There are many things the same in Milei.” The speaker is Rafael Bielsa, former chancellor of Néstor Kirchner and direct head of the libertarian in Eduardo Eurnekian’s America Corporation for almost a decade, a time in which they had quite a relationship. “It is the same in How he thought, what he wanted with the economy, is the same as who his idols were, but there were aspects of his feelings that I did not know: the Javier I knew was not spiteful, he was not vengeful, he was not petty, it was rather the opposite of all that. So naturally I have to ask myself: what happened?”
Bielsa put into words, in an interview with journalist Daniel Tognetti for Canal Red, something that the small circle of friends that the economist had at the time, a group of less than five people who always preferred a low profile, has been saying for some time. time, although always with the recorder off. “This is no longer the Javier who was my friend,” several of them maintained, something they had been highlighting since the man became a deputy. According to the people who knew him best, people who had access to his privacy like no one else, this is how the President arrives at his first year in office: transformed, and not for the better.
Milei himself notices a change in him, although he maintains that he is motivated by how well the Government he commands is doing. “I’m getting better and better,” he said in a report to an official streaming channel, something that translated could be understood as being emboldened.
Thus begins the second season of the libertarian administration. With a more radicalized president, and a Government that follows him.
Maze. That idea had been installed in Santiago Caputo’s head even before the rebound in the presidential image began, a moment that most pollsters placed in mid- or late October. But there was a chronology of events that already pointed to an acceleration of the administration: the succession of two acts. The first was from Milei, in the last days of September in Parque Lezama, and the other was in mid-November in San Miguel, at the launch of the group “Las Fuerzas del Cielo”. Both left several controversies. The President spoke of lowering the age of imputability, criticized the “traitors” within his space – days after the expulsion of Chancellor Diana Mondino -, pushed the idea of Cristina Kirchner being imprisoned and harangued the crowd to insult everyone. journalism. In the event led by Daniel “El Gordo Dan” Parisini, not only were many of these phrases repeated but it was also played with a fascist aesthetic.
“The first was to strengthen the hard core around Javier. The second was to do the same but in other figures, many are going to be candidates next year,” says a man who frequently enters and leaves the Casa Rosada. There is something else that emerged in the two meetings, which during the national broadcast that Milei did to celebrate his first year in the Government – where he returned with the idea of closing the Central Bank and paying taxes in dollars – became even more consolidated. It is the idea of stepping on the accelerator, not only in the field of politics and economics but also in the symbolic. It is what the ruling party calls “the cultural battle”, the struggle to establish a “new hegemony”, in the terms of the philosopher Antonio Gramsci.
Future. Milei believes he is chosen by God. As NEWS has been reporting, the fact that the president believes he has a link with a supernatural entity is not only not an issue in his private life but also affects and conditions the direction of his Government. A particularity that all messianic leaders share is that they try not only to seize power but then radically transform the place they rule. Milei also points in that sense.
The expanding messianism began to be noticed in the Government in different ways. One is that in public they began to talk about the “seven years of Milei”, a topic that the president himself plays with. Another is aesthetically: the Roman symbology, which Caputo also usually uses from his social networks, with which they show an emperor Milei. Is it just ironic consumption for the screens? Either way, there is a very serious issue going around. The Government is analyzing a constitutional reform with increasing enthusiasm, and they even seemed to receive, in that sense, a nod from the opposition. “I sincerely believe that the country owes a true constitutional reform,” said Cristina Kirchner in the podcast “Generación 94” by the journalist of this medium, Rodis Recalt. Will the ruling party go down this path after the midterm elections, at which time they will have more votes in both Chambers?
But, as the libertarian has been saying, next year’s battle will not be for politics but “for ideas.” And that is where the Government begins to introduce topics on the agenda that used to be very far from Argentine public life. One is the world of weapons, as this medium reported in its last edition, where it revealed the story and business network behind the show that Caputo and other libertarian priests put on when they show themselves shooting at shooting ranges. In recent days the matter escalated again. The Ministry of Security changed by decree the minimum age to be a legitimate user of weapons (it went from 21 to 18 years, which logically expanded the market considerably), in addition to another DNU in which they enabled the “Long Rage” discipline, competitive tournaments of sniper style long weapons. “We celebrate that good citizens can access weapons,” said Patricia Bullrich when the first news was communicated. Will this be another issue of the election campaign to come?
The acceleration of the Government is also noticeable in the aggressiveness of the President, who in recent times has attacked this editorial several times again. A novelty that occurred since Donald Trump’s victory was that the libertarian for the first time began to assume himself to be “right-wing,” something he did for the first time at the CPAC event in Buenos Aires at the beginning of December. Until then, he had always claimed to be a “libertarian liberal” or “anarcho-capitalist.”
Along with that definition, strategic in his map of contacts at an international level, Milei deepened a narrative that he already had in mind but that now reached another level. “The only way to combat organized evil is with organized good. We must not give in to evil, we must fight it with more force. There can be no consensus between good and evil,” Milei said in that speech. And he also added something else: “We have to be willing to give our lives for the cause.”
It remains to be seen how they will coexist within the Government in this new phase. Everyone is adapting: Caputo began to show his face more – Milei uploaded a photo with him on the national network’s day, and also went to the official streaming “La Misa” on two occasions – and Karina even dared to speak in public. In short, both will have to give way to the silent struggle that they maintain around the assembly of the electoral lists and that escalated since each one launched their own libertarian youth: “The forces of heaven”, of the first, and the “Official libertarian Youth” of the second. Will the blood reach the river? In the ruling party everyone rules it out, but the Milei brothers have a long history of expelling their closest people. Furthermore, with a radicalized administration, the line between best friends and great traitors is going to be increasingly thin. It is the new phase of a recharged Government.
