There are no chances to go up to javier milei to the ring because he has been up for a while. And he has hit very hard. How do you inflate a candidate for whom one in five people are inclined today? From 2010 until now, outside of Peronism and Macri, only Sergio Massa reached that percentage in 2015. Nobody else.
In Europe, United States and Latin America anti-democratic political forces expand. An extensive bibliography has studied the phenomenon of Trump, Bolsonaro and Vox, among others. All sectors with which meets milei. They are against women, they are racist, classist, homophobic and anti-democratic. When they win they want to concentrate power. When they lose, they say that there was fraud and encourage their followers to forcibly occupy the institutions of the Republic. they scream publicly against “the left-handed” as the leader of Vox in Spain did to the applause of Milei.
As Milei hugs José Antonio Kast, defender in Pinochet’s Chile, It is obvious that he does not speak of freedom of expression, but of the freedom of Power. He assured in a meeting with these anti-democratic forces in Brazil: “You have to understand that socialism is not an honest adversary, but rather the enemy. Not understanding that implies taking lukewarm positions that lead to greater doses of socialism until leading you to the dictatorship of the left”.
An authoritarian referent, who worked for genocidal as Bussi, is the one who is channeling the enormous political disappointment of a sector of Argentines. Milei will try to dollarize the angry vote. In his book “How democracies die”, Levitsky and Ziblatt show that when these types of leaders come to power it is not because the voters wanted such an outcome. Instead, democratic leaders have an enormous responsibility, especially on this critical point: either flirt with these candidates or isolate and categorically denounce them. Flirting was present in the worst outcomes, they show. Alarming if you look at the panorama.
“The abdication of political responsibility by established leaders often marks the first step towards autocracy in a country,” they explain. Levitsky and Ziblatt.
You have to politicize the debate with Milei. Demonstrate that their economic proposals are irresponsible and that their international allies are violent and undemocratic.
*By Alejandro Grimson, social anthropologist and writer. Author of “What is Peronism?”.
by Alejandro Grimson*
