Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party. He grew up in Argentina.
If libertarianism is out of fashion, no-one has told Argentine voters. Last Sunday, a third of them voted for the dishevilled, side-burned, self-described anarcho-capitalist economist, Javier Milei.
Milei belives in abolishing the welfare state, and while he admits some role for government in preserving law and order, would give people the right to bear arms — the better to defend themselves against each other, and of course the state itself, which he characterises as the enemy of the people. He hates the Catholic Church and it is impossible to tell whether his musings about converting to Judaism because of the religion’s “economic aspects” are serious admiration for the faith or an anti-semitic joke.
Theology aside, what explains the outburst of support for the kind of ideas normally expressed at the fringes of think tank seminars?
Inflation running at over 100 per cent is part of the story. Milei wants to adopt the dollar and promised people they’d be paid in greenbacks (which sounds nice until they realise quite how few they would get: at the black market rate, Argentina’s peso is worth 1/7th of a rouble).
But a large amount of what’s happening is simple frustration. It’s almost 20 years since Argentina’s last major crisis, caused by the collapse of Carlos Menem’s fixing of the peso one to one with the dollar, and so-called left-wing Peronists have dominated politics since. That this is not quite the ordinary left-right cycle becomes apparent once it turns out that Menem was once also a Peronist, but of its macro-economically orthodox branch.
One way to interpret Milei is as the ultimate anti-Peronist.
Peronism, or to give its its official, but made-up name, “Justicialism” has dominated politics in Argentina since at least the 1940s. It’s impossible to place on the conventional left-right spectrum, and Peronists have espoused ideas associated with the extreme Right (Perón’s government helped fugitive nazis escape Europe; and he chose Franco’s Spain as his place of exile when deposed by military coups) the far Left (Nestor Kirchner and his wife and successor Cristina were allied with Hugo Chavez) and the IMF (Carlos Menem in the 1990s), but its central practice is patronage. The Peronist party controls the Peronist state, which takes care of Peronist voters. Individual rights, free markets, the rule of law and public goods are not indigenous to their idea of politics.
The Kirchners, who became so dominant that Argentines, at least until Sunday, defined themselves as pro or anti-Kirchner, as much as they did pro or anti-Peronist, took over and ran Argentina as an ideologically left-wing interventionist state, hostile to the international financial markets, and close to Venezuela, China and Russia.
Their rule was economically disastrous, and they lost power to a free-marketeer, Mauricio Macri. Macri struggled to put Argentina’s house in order and the Peronists came back, this time under the apparently moderate Alberto Fernández (no relation to Cristina), but Cristina wielded power behind the throne until the two fell out during the pandemic. She has now had to leave politics after being convicted of fraud.
Macri had stitched together a coalition now called Juntos por el Cambio (Together for Change) which had been expected to dominate the primaries and have a high chance of winning outright in October. It had looked as though Horacio Larreta, the governor of Buenos Aires City province, would win by repeating the conciliatory strategy that won over moderate Peronists in his own provincial election at a national level. Instead, Patricia Bullrich, a veteran right winger, who, we might say, with some caution because of certain islands in the South Atlantic, played Thatcher to Larreta’s Heath, beat him to become Juntos’ candidate.
She and Milei will face Sergio Massa, a moderate Peronist, who has the misfortune to be Argentina’s economy minister.
The primaries show an electorate that has switched radically right on economics. People subjected to two decades of incompetent statism like the sound of self-reliance and a government that gets out of their way. What had looked like a race where Laretta and Massa would vie for a disillusioned middle of the road voter has now become a battle for radical economic reform between Milei and Bullrich.
Sunday’s was the first round of voting, in compulsory open primaries, that select the candidate each party puts forward in general elections next October. If nobody wins more than 45 per cent (or at least 40 per cent with a lead of 10 per cent over their rivals), the vote will go to a run-off between the top two.
Massa will run on a “stop the Right” ticket, accusing Milei of wanting to bring back the military dictatorship, and thereby squeeze into the second round. Bullrich has to hope that a country that realises it needs radical surgery will go for the experienced operator over the maverick thinks people should be able to sell their organs.
But Argentine voters have had, at least since Perón, a weakness for stylish populists who haven’t thought their policies through. In this sense, Milei, rather than the Peronists’ ultimate foe is a fitting heir to Perón himself.
The man who insists he’s an enemy of the state could well find himself in charge of its executive branch.