One night Federico Sturzenegger dreamed that he was dying. Specifically, he dreamed that he died without seeing Gimnasia de La Plata champion, a club that never won a professional title. The economist, born in that city and a tripper fanatic, got up sweating and did not sleep again the entire night. It was October 2008.
Days passed but the dream did not leave his head. The man was engrossed and mulling over the topic, trying to understand if there was some hidden meaning or hidden moral. At first he thought it was an indirect blow from the great campaign that Estudiantes, the classic rival, had been doing, which would end with Juan Sebastión Verón’s team lifting its fourth Copa Libertadores next year. Then the memories of the championship that San Lorenzo took from Gimnasia in 1995 came to him, a match that he himself saw and suffered on the field in the La Plata forest. The fact that he was approaching 50 years old – at that time he was about to turn 43 – and the possibility of an internal dilemma due to the passage of time also crossed his mind.
But one afternoon the revelation came. She wasn’t dreaming about Gymnastics. The team was just a symbolic representation of Argentina. Sturzenegger became convinced that he had really dreamed that he would die without seeing his country “coming out as champion,” without seeing it growing and developing.
This is, at least, the story that Javier Milei’s black monk likes to tell. Transforming this land is his eternal and great obsession, the one that leaves him sleepless at night, the one that kept him working overtime for almost two years to put together a megaproject that, through DNU and through Congress, is now a reality.
The economist is convinced that he is embodying a “revolution,” a word that he loves to use and that has both positive and negative aspects. The thing is that reality, he thinks, is going to have to adjust to his daydreams. Whatever it takes.
The relationship
On July 26, 2017, Milei made his debut on the program that would later lead him to fame, the media prelude to his political success. “Loose Animals” started that day at 11:30 p.m., very punctual. One minute and 58 seconds later the libertarian was going to say his first words on that show. They were addressed to the protagonist of this cover.
“Who works better? “Prat Gay or Sturzenegger?” Alejandro Fantino asked him, in reference to the internal dispute already visible between the then Minister of Finance and the president of the Central Bank, who were fighting against each other for the control of economic variables. Milei’s response was categorical. “For scandal, but for scandal, he takes fifty bodies out of him, Sturzenegger. He beats him by scandal, and if what he is doing comes to pass, he will be the best president of the BCRA in history,” he said.
Those were days when Milei harassed Stuzenegger with incessant messages on his cell phone. “COLOSSO,” each one of them started, all with capital letters, as the libertarian usually uses for proper names in chats. The then media economist sent her ideas, proposals, fragments of notes in which she defended him, or simply wanted to talk to him. In fact, because of these exchanges and some meetings they had, Milei once said that he was Stuzenegger’s “ad honorem advisor” during his time at Central, an idea that was difficult to contrast with reality but that matched a fact that at that time At that time it deeply disturbed him: due to his constant appearances on television, where he even talked about how he practiced tantric sex, no “serious” liberal took him into account. Milei sought in figures like Sturzenegger -or Alberto Benegas Lynch- the validation that he found difficult to obtain, especially in distinguished figures from the academic world.
The recipient of these messages took it almost as an eccentricity, and described the conversations he had with the long-haired media person as something humorous. But since then several things have changed.
Milei is now President. Sturzenegger – at least for a significant portion of Argentines – did not remain in history as the “best president of the Central”, but as a centerpiece of another government that did not live up to expectations. And since he left what is until now his last official position in a government, an obsession went through him, which was driven by the specter of the failure of the Alliance, a project in which he also embarked: why were they not successful? those administrations? What did they fail? What did he fail in?
The obsession
At first it started as a personal challenge, to revisit the story and try to understand where it had gone wrong. Then it became a project: to dedicate, despite the frank resistance of his wife, every Saturday for two years to studying Argentine legislation point by point. During that period, to everyone that Sturzenegger received, from any field, who came to ask him a problem, he answered the same: “Bring me this turned into a bill.” Of every ten who came with a complaint, one or two remained.
The first idea was to put together a book. Jorge Fontevecchia told the newspaper Perfil that it was going to be called “Anti-establishment Manifesto.” But then, on a trip by Patricia Bullrich to the United States, already in the campaign, the two met to talk. Sturzenegger told her about his work and the then president of the PRO was interested. Since then they met once a fortnight, mostly via Zoom, but sometimes at the economist’s house.
After Bullrich’s defeat, the meeting with Milei was natural. Here you have to first understand how both of your heads work. The President is convinced that he is chosen by God, and his way of understanding reality is theocratic, of religious conviction. Sturzenegger is very different but very similar at the same time: he has a blind, extreme, almost childish faith, some say, in science and economic discipline. He is, like Milei, a dogmatist, detached from the material world, who believes with deep conviction and honesty that reality will adjust to his theory and what the numbers tell him.
There are plenty of examples: when he assured, as president of the BCRA, that the increase in rates was not going to impact inflation (“when a price rises it means that less can be spent on other goods and that the price of these goods should go down”). “, he said), when he defended the thesis that the appearance of the Metrobus in the City and the 16 minutes of travel that it would save would end up increasing productivity by 7 percent, or when he promoted the Zero Deficit law in 2001, which He maintained that the State could not spend a peso more than what it collected, even if that meant not paying salaries or pensions, a regulation that ended up being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. They are all proposals, absolute truths, which are closed in the manuals, but not, at least, in Argentina. There one plus one is not always two and the devil always ends up getting his tail in.
This way of analyzing reality is complemented, in Sturzenegger, by the other side of the dream that tormented him in 2008: he does not want to die without seeing Argentina growing, and he thinks that he himself is the best recipe for this disease. It depends who you ask, but those who have treated the black monk of Milei define him as megalomaniac, egocentric or some of the variants thereof. The project, which proposes to modify Argentine reality at a stroke, would seem to be a confirmation of that thesis.
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