In practical terms, Javier Milei’s presence in Bahía Blanca will have been of no use. Far from helping those responding to the natural disaster that had caused a wave of deaths, he forced them to worry about the President’s personal safety. However, as he understood very well, it is an unavoidable duty of every self-respecting leader to immediately move to the scene of calamities as tragic as the one caused by the storm and declare himself determined to do everything he can to help the victims.
Although it would have been more rational to let local authorities and relevant organizations deal with the disaster, the political costs of taking such a stance can be very high. The reputation of American President George W. Bush never recovered from the negative impact of his supposedly weak reaction to Hurricane Katrina, which, in August 2005, destroyed entire areas of New Orleans; In the opinion of many compatriots, the decision not to lead the rescue operations and play the role of father of the nation damaged him even more than the war in Iraq.
Milei is clearly determined not to make mistakes similar to the one perpetrated by the American. His brilliant rise to the presidency was not due to his skills as an economist but to the personal image that he knew how to create, that of a man who, both in good times and bad, always shows his face and never hesitates in tell the truth. It is to be expected, therefore, that his presidential administration will be marked by his willingness to face in person all the difficulties that arise so that no one can accuse him of being reluctant to fully assume the responsibilities that fall to him.
Unfortunately, for him and almost 46 million others, what awaits him will not be entirely easy. No matter how distressing the sporadic climate disasters are, for everyone except those directly affected, the damage they cause cannot be compared to what has been caused by the years of misrule by figures who, faithful to the radical populist slogan according to which the economic always has to being subordinated to politics, they brought the country to the brink of a precipice.
Milei is convinced that the only way to prevent the economic shock, which is already inevitable, from having irreversible consequences will be to try to manage the crisis by applying the well-known liberal recipes as soon as possible. For now, he has the enthusiastic support of a minority and the perhaps hopeful acquiescence of many others, but there is no guarantee that the alliance thus assumed will be sufficient to enable him to defeat those determined to frustrate efforts to dismantle the traditional order of the who depend economically or psychologically.
Unlike his Kirchnerist predecessors, who were ideological nomads who improvised circumstantial “stories” based on scraps left by a variety of failed political projects, Milei is the owner of an unusually firm ideology. He believes so much in “freedom, damn it,” that, before realizing that he could really achieve the presidency, he was willing to demand initiatives as extreme but in his opinion logical as the free sale of organs without it bothering him at all. the rejection of almost everyone. Fortunately for him, he soon recognized that appearing as a scandalously disruptive media personality was one thing and being the president of a country overwhelmed by a dysfunctional economic “model” was quite another. By the way, it would not be in his interest to spend gunpowder on chimangos; He will need it for matters that are much more important.
Although Milei has barely had time to form a government, a task that is proving very difficult because the party that was improvised around his image, La Libertad Avanza, lacks experienced cadres, and Economy Minister Luis Caputo has had than to limit himself to taking emergency measures, he is already the target of criticism from both his declared enemies and his alleged friends. They express themselves baffled by what they say is the delay in presenting a coherent recovery “plan” and, even more so, by their apparent resistance to undertaking a frontal fight against the corruption of “the caste” and, above all, of Cristina and members of their environment.
Such an accusation sounds somewhat exaggerated; Unless the Justice system comes under strong government pressure, which at this point seems very unlikely, those who want to end up deprived of their liberty by the courts guilty of appropriating billions of dollars of public money without the President and his companions have had to lift a finger. So far at least, Milei insists that she will respect the independence of the Judiciary.
Still, there are signs that, despite his lack of experience, Milei is already behaving like a seasoned politician who understands that, to succeed, he will have to consolidate the still nascent movement he leads so that it operates as a party that, Despite the individualism you preach, be relatively disciplined. For many militia members of the first hour, what is happening is painful because it forces them to give up positions that they had in their sights to newcomers, but it happens that in order to function well, any government – not to mention one that aspires to rebuild a country devastated by decades of venal arrangements between corporate groups – needs the collaboration of many thousands of honest, vigorous and capable people. Will Milei be in a position to assemble such a government before difficulties have accumulated so much that those willing to compromise become scarce? We still do not know the answer to this key question.
To the surprise of many, Vice President Victoria Villarruel has turned out to be a shrewd politician. Without wasting time, he managed to wake up the Kirchnerist senators early, preventing them from retaining the control they held of all the commissions and ensuring that the second in line of presidential succession remained in the hands of the current ruling party by getting Bartolomé Abdala to be the provisional president. of the Upper House. To achieve this, she added the seven senators of La Libertad Avanza to those of the PRO, the UCR and the provincial blocs, thus frustrating Cristina’s loyalists.
The attitude of those senators who respond to the governors of their respective provinces reflected the awareness of their bosses that, in the era of “no money”, they would be forced to reduce their expenses, which is why many, including the boss from Santiago del Estero, Gerardo Zamora, who until recently was a fervent Kirchnerist, has already announced adjustment programs whose severity will have surprised the President himself. The thing is that for years Milei was one of the very few who dared to pronounce the word “adjustment” without swearing that it would never occur to him to tolerate reducing public spending by a single cent, but now it seems that many politicians want to emulate him; They understand that the alternative would be to let the country, up to its neck in debt and battered by what the rest of the world would call hyperinflation, sink, a tragedy that would only suit a handful of criminals and extremists with a totalitarian mentality.
The recognition by more and more political leaders that it would be futile to simply wait for the economic situation to improve without themselves having to endorse unfriendly measures is due not to Milei’s passionate oratory but to the sorry state of national finances. Even so, there is no doubt that a consensus is being formed that has much more in common with the way of thinking of the “crazy” libertarian than with the one that, just a year ago, was supported by politicians who, on principle, refused to be impressed by the numbers.
In other parts of the planet, the fact that the bulk of the population has expressed its approval of what Milei proposes has motivated some disbelief, since it is common to assume that, outside of some places of Protestant or, perhaps, Confucian culture, the The majority would never vote in favor of a candidate who declared himself determined to carry out a very severe austerity program. Yet this is what has just happened in a country that is internationally famous for its propensity to indulge in populist extravagances.
Is this a temporary anomaly or something permanent? If, to the surprise of skeptics, the majority’s willingness to confront the challenge posed by the disintegration of the corporate economic model survives the events of the coming weeks – it is not the same as accepting that an adjustment is inevitable and stoically enduring the unpleasant consequences. that he will have-, would radically change the image not only of the Milei government but also that of Argentina as a whole. In that case, the country would become an attractive place for those who handle gigantic amounts of money and who, worried as many are about what is happening in other parts of the world, would want to take advantage of what for them would be a great opportunity.
