With a press release from the President’s office, The Government congratulated José Luis Espert for being the brand new president of the Permanent Budget and Finance Commission of the Chamber of Deputies. It wasn’t all, Javier Milei, from his own account, greeted the legislator: “Professor, welcome to the Forces of Heaven,” he wrote. They had met at Casa Rosada the day before.
Until these last weeks, the relationship between the two was in trouble. In fact, Milei even accused Espert of having tried to bribe him with 300 thousand dollars to lower his candidacy for deputy. “The economist told the anecdote a dozen times, not only in confidence but on some occasions, even at events and television sets,” revealed Juan Luis González in El Loco, the unauthorized biography of the President. And he completed: “It’s about the day he broke off relations with Espert. It was in mid-2021, shortly before his formal political debut. By that time the Milei-Espert relationship was exploited.”
The complete anecdote told in Crazy:
The first sparks had appeared in the summer, when they went for a walk together on the Buenos Aires coast, the province in which the bald economist was going to compete. That had been quite a feat. Not only because of the animosity that the two of them always had for each other, but because the libertarian hates the heat and the sun and got irritated with those walks along the promenade that made him sweat.
With Monday’s newspaper it is almost fun to review those months where they maintained the fiction that they were best friends united in a common cause: one was going to compete in Buenos Aires and the other in the Federal Capital, a duo that appeared together before the society under the banner of making “the ideas of freedom” grow. “The teacher,” Milei called him with an assumed affection, and the other returned the false kindnesses, highlighting the lack that “people like Javier” did in politics.
Some time later they barely spoke to each other. The last time they spoke was in a one-on-one meeting. According to Milei’s story, when Espert arrived he was agitated and brought a suitcase: it was 300 thousand dollars, in exchange for him agreeing to lower his candidacy for deputy. According to the libertarian’s version, his old ally wanted to convince him to get out of the race because he had grown too much in the polls, and he was beginning to get votes from the PRO list in the Federal Capital. “The teacher” had made a tactical alliance with Larreta in 2019, and Milei saw the hand of the “sinister”, as he calls the former Buenos Aires mayor, behind that fortune. If this version were real, would he have been thinking at that moment, looking at the wide open suitcase, of Giacomini? In what his best friend told him about the politician he had allied himself with?
—The money was on the table. And you see the thousands of dollars there and you have to decide. They wanted me to cum —he told Fantino in an interview at the end of 2022, although without mentioning who, how or when.
Near Espert, however, they have a much flatter version. They say Milei had liquidity problems when she agreed to join the front at the end of 2020. That, in fact, one of their conditions for accepting the invitation was money and that they sent it to him every few weeks. And that was exactly what Espert was doing in that meeting: bringing him his payment, although they assure that it was much less than the figure that the now intimate enemy says.
They also maintain that from this meeting Milei invented a film that fit perfectly with what, they think on this side of the liberal divide, the anarcho-capitalist wanted to do from minute zero.: use Espert’s knowledge and contacts in politics to take your first steps in this world. Climbing the figure of someone who had already been a presidential candidate and then abandoning him, a betrayal that would have been planned in cold blood.
It’s hard to know who’s telling the truth. What is clear is that it was a political society that was destined to fail. The misgivings they already had from their time as economists competing for airtime could only grow when competing for voters’ attention. However, there is something on which they both agree: the relationship between them exploded in that last meeting.
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