Argentine politics has a digital memory, and sometimes it is relentless. In the last few hours, an old tweet from Javier Milei directed against Fernando Iglesias, the new Argentine ambassador to Belgium, reappeared, once again putting the archive in tension with the present of power.
The message was published on March 24, 2018, when Milei still did not imagine a presidential race and showed himself as a furious critic of Macrism and what he called “the political corporation.” In that tweet, the current president wrote: “Here we have the piece of human shit Commissioner Ferminio Iglesias. Kambiemos only came to change who holds the positions and make use of the privileges of the shitty political corporation. The State is a scam.”
The post also included a capture of a journalistic note that questioned Iglesias for the collection of congressional travel expenses, for an amount of 77 thousand pesos, an issue that at that time was used as an example of the use of privileges by the traditional political leadership. For the Milei of that time, Iglesias was one more piece of the Macri machine that he attacked without nuances, with brutal language and without concessions.
That Milei was, for years, one of the fiercest critics of Mauricio Macri and Cambiemos. He denounced what he considered a moral scam by the government, accused its leaders of supporting the same statist model as Kirchnerism and built a good part of his public identity from that frontal antagonism.
Eight years later, the scenario is different. Already as president, Milei decided to appoint Fernando Iglesias as ambassador to Belgium, a decision that surprised even within the ruling party itself and that revived the debate about the limits of libertarian pragmatism. The former deputy and historical figure of the PRO, who was one of the harshest spokespersons for Macriism in Congress, thus went from being the target of insults to occupying a key diplomatic position by decision of the same man who had reviled him.
The digital archive preserves those words, which today reappear to stress the link between the opposition Milei and the Milei in the exercise of power. For some, it is another example of realpolitik; for others, uncomfortable evidence of how the Milei of the past collides with the Milei of the present.
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