The labor reform promoted by the government of Javier Milei seeks greater flexibility in labor relations, reduction of litigation and promotion of formal employment through changes in compensation, vacations and collective agreements; The project entered the Senate on December 11, 2025 and has been debated in committees since December 17, with the ruling party aiming for its approval before the end of the year. Federico Sturzenegger, Minister of Deregulation, occupies a key role as the main editor, promoter and defender of the initiative, highlighting its pillars in job creation, reduction of fiscal costs and legal predictability.
In a cover story by Juan Luis González, NOTICIAS thoroughly investigated the official, when he did not yet hold a position but was already the brain of the Bases Law. Below is the note:
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. I wasn’t dreaming about gymnastics. The team was just a symbolic representation of Argentina. Sturzenegger became convinced that he had truly dreamed that he would die without seeing his country “coming out as a 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 by dribbling with 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. At all costs.
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 conflict 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. “By scandal, but by scandal, he beats him fifty lengths, 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 him ideas, proposals, fragments of notes in which he 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 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 crossed him, which was driven by the specter of the failure of the Alliance, a project in which he also embarked: why were those administrations not successful? 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 his wife’s frank resistance, 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 fares 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 would save would end up increasing productivity by 7 percent, or when he promoted the Zero Deficit law in 2001, which supported that the State could not spend a peso more than 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 on who you ask, but those who have treated the black monk of Milei define him as megalomaniac, egocentric or some of its variants. The project, which proposes to modify Argentine reality at a stroke, would seem to be a confirmation of that thesis.
To the Government. The economist’s ambitious project crossed another line with Milei. As has already been told in these pages, until the night of the PASO no one in La Libertad Avanza – except for the one who believes he was chosen by God and his sister Karina – thought that they had any chance of governing the country in just four months. Sturzenegger’s work was a balm in the face of this distressing reality: before Milei gave the speech in which he announced the DNU, there was no government plan or an economic one, beyond Luis Caputo’s announcement to raise the official dollar to $800. How would the first month of the Government be going without the assistance – bad or good – of Sturzenegger’s work? What would they have to show?
The project, then, gave the President the platform from which to translate into reality his much-talked-about thesis that he was coming to transform Argentina. It is not only an economic, legislative or judicial fact, but above all a political fact. And this is where the unknowns open up.
The first comes from the past. Sturzenegger – economic policy secretary of De la Rúa, president of Banco Ciudad during Macri’s administration, national deputy and then head of the BCRA – maintained consistency in his long political career: constant fights with his peers, in tune with the chicanery with which he usually disqualifies those who criticize him, as he did in the newspaper Perfil when he spoke about the CGT and related it to the last dictatorship.
His clashes during the Macri administration, especially with Caputo – of whom he has the worst opinion – could make for a book in itself. How are you going to live now with people whom, for the most part, you have just met? There is another question: the project is involved in the most diverse areas and, despite the fact that the man – at the presidential request – went to defend it in the media, he is not the one who signed it nor would he take charge of any possible problems in Justice. Several officials sweat when they see Sturzenegger in interviews, in which he sometimes even rehearses new proposals on air. Who is going to go to Congress to appear before opposition deputies and senators? Do you have the numbers to approve it?
This lack of political tact motivated the judicial reaction, which already gave approval to the CGT in its protection in labor jurisdiction. Those who know the judicial cloth say that only someone who analyzes reality through a text could have sought help to carry out the project with the Marval, O’Farrell & Mairal studio. They maintain a historical dispute with the federal chambermaid Carlos Grecco, one of the heads of the contentious administrative jurisdiction, where a good part of the precautionary measures that are presented against the DNU will be processed.
A doubt that adds to this. Who were the hundred people that Sturzenegger says collaborated on the project? One is Jorge Muratorio, from the study just mentioned. Another is Eduardo Rodríguez Chirillo, now Secretary of Energy. With Rodolfo Barra, Treasury Attorney, who must represent the
The state of the eventual trials is not so clear: the Government assured that he had participated, but in the interviews he has been giving he seems not to know the content in depth.
There is also another line of controversy, which, among others, was supported by leaders such as Juan Grabois. It is the alleged presence of lawyers representing large corporations, among which the Funes de Rioja firm is mentioned. “It intends to disqualify a work because of its authors and not because of its content, which shows a great poverty of arguments. I am a lawyer for large companies. Does that disqualify me?” says Ricardo Ramírez Calvo, who was one of those responsible for the work, and who showed his differences with Sturzenegger by removing it through DNU.
Either way, it’s a story that has just begun. And Sturzenegger, it is clear, wants to fulfill his dream.
