For over a year now, Javier Milei has dominated Argentina’s political stage. He was initially allowed to so because other politicians feared that it would be suicide for them to assume responsibility for what was happening in a country that seemed to be careening towards an overwhelming disaster. By the time they realised that, thanks largely to Milei, the sky was not about to come crashing down, most understood it would be premature for them to try and stage a comeback.
Unlike Mauricio Macri, who assumed that, without the backing of a parliamentary majority, he would have to do things very gradually and spend much time negotiating with individuals who wanted his administration to fail, from day one Milei has applied a ruthless austerity programme that even the allegedly hard-hearted IMF technocrats thought was a bit much. To the astonishment of many, this paid off. If the opinion polls are right, half the population remains happy with Milei’s no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners approach to the country’s many problems and wants him to continue on the course he has set.
Some approve of what he is up to because they like seeing the president behave in a monarchical fashion, others because they assume that, being an economist, he knows exactly what must be done to repair the damage that was caused by many generations of “fiscally degenerate” politicians and will not be tempted to repeat their mistakes. As for all that stuff about the “forces of heaven” and the philo.
