From Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro, the pandemic provided opportunities – and set traps – for the leaders of the new American right, in and out of power.
But the one who best knew how to make the covid carpe diem profitable for the ideology of individual freedoms and denial of science is the new Argentine president Javier Milei.
If it were not for the pandemic, Milei would not have been able to mobilize the vote of frustrated Argentine youth, deprived of their social life and eager to burst the system. Her party, La Libertad Avanza, led an underground rebellion against confinement policies, mandatory mask-wearing, and vaccines.
Already a beloved figure among Argentine youth, Milei became a hero for millions of young people, mainly men, who were suffering from the social and psychological consequences of the pandemic.
"The entire public discussion was focused on how to protect the most vulnerable population, that is, the elderly, and young people were left out of the debate; that generated a repressed volcano that, in some way, was expressed in the elections," says Ezequiel. Ipar, sociologist at the National University of San Martín in Buenos Aires.
"It was chance; and he took advantage of it." Milei won the November elections by a wide margin of twelve points and garnered 69% of the votes of those under 25 years of age, mainly young men.
During the hardest years of the pandemic, Milei attacked the measures of a center-left government that he described as a "criminal infection."
"He participated in the most transgressive demonstrations in 2020-21," explains Ipar in an interview held in a cafeteria in Buenos Aires. "He endorsed mistrust regarding vaccines and was against any state restriction on mobility. He encouraged clandestine meetings where they took photos while drinking beer and stacked masks to burn."
The images of a private party for President Alberto Fernández added more fuel to the fire of youth rebellion. But the truth is that state restrictions contributed to Argentina registering fewer deaths from covid than countries like Brazil or the United States, then governed by the denialist right.
Milei's rebellious speech was a psychological balm; It eased the weight of a moral burden for many young people. "In the pandemic there was a demand for intergenerational solidarity. Milei told them: "Do not feel guilty for your desire for freedom; "You are not doing anything unfair just for wanting something as basic as wanting to see your friends, or your girlfriend!" Ipar said.
The result was a political earthquake. "It is impossible to separate the pandemic from the emergence of La Libertad Avanza," agrees Juan Luis González in his book Loco.
Curiously, - as González details in his book - Milei's already precarious mental health was harmed by forced isolation during the pandemic. This caused a psychic crisis in 20231 that Milei interpreted as a message from God - transmitted through the ghost of the future president's dead dog - and which convinced him that he had been chosen to lead the country.
"Living with his parents, locked up due to quarantine and without the support of his historic psychologist, whom he stopped visiting due to the pandemic, Milei's emotional instability reached its peak," González writes in Loco. "In the course of 2020, God, the liberal philosopher and Murray Rothbard himself (the libertarian economist who is an idol of Milei) communicate with him to encourage him to take the leap. (...) so that he accepts “the mission ”.
The traditional right of Mauricio Macri and Patricia Bullrich also tried to make the pandemic profitable. He joined the demonstrations against the restrictive measures of the Fernández government. But only Milei knew how to incorporate the youth rebellion against health policies into her general ultra-libertarian ideology. "The argument was the same as Macri and Bullrich, but Milei completed it with a deeper criticism of the State. He attacked the repressive State embodied in health measures and then generalized the criticism to all types of state intervention," explains Ipar.
A former rock singer and politically incorrect talk show host, Milei had already seduced many young men with his visceral harangues against the so-called caste. The pandemic was the catalyst for the assault on the Casa Rosada. To deepen his criticism, Milei published the book Pandenomics in 2021, about the economic impact of the measures. It was later discovered that large sections of the book were plagiarized from texts by economists in Mexico and Spain.
The rest is history. Thanks in large part to youthful impetus, Milei managed to win the elections and now intends to adopt a radical agenda of ultra-liberal reforms. "The birth of mileism is located in the anti-quarantine protests and their demand for freedom," summarizes José Natanson, the Argentine director of Le Monde Diplomatique, in a new book about the extreme right in Latin America.
Natanson is critical of the harshness of the health control measures that paved Milei's path to the presidency. "A 15-year-old guy who had a girlfriend, he saw her two or three times a week and then nothing. What do you think is going to happen with that kid? He's going to hate you and Milei is the expression of that," he explains. in an interview with González in the book Loco.
The experience in the pandemic of Milei's close ideological allies such as Bolsonaro or Trump was radically different. "Bolsonaro is the only Brazilian president who was not re-elected and I have no doubt that his denialism regarding Covid was a fundamental factor in his failure," said Arthur Chioro, former health minister, in a telephone interview. "People rejected the lack of empathy; their way of speaking sarcastically about the dead, of minimizing people's suffering."
Something similar happened in the case of Trump, whose popularity plummeted during the pandemic despite his attacks against the confinement measures adopted at the state level and against the covid czar, Anthony Fauci.
The explanation may be simple. Those who had to deal with covid from power were punished. Those who waved the flag of freedom from the opposition like Milei, made the frustration profitable.
But there are other factors, and the most important is the differential weight of the youth vote for Bolsonaro and Trump compared to Milei.
Unlike Argentina, the new post-rational right in the US and Brazil is a phenomenon mainly of older people. Trump depended, to a large extent, on the votes of older Americans, over 50 years old, the most vulnerable in the pandemic. Young Americans did not respond to the denialist discourse and Joe Biden won almost 60% of the votes of voters between 18 and 29 years old in the 2020 elections. In Brazil, young people overwhelmingly voted for the left-wing candidate, Fernando Haddad, in the 2018 presidential elections and, even more so, to Lula in 2022.
Only Milei - and, to some extent, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, the president of the autonomous government of Madrid in Spain - has been able to mobilize a youth vote strong enough to win the elections based on the social and psychological frustrations generated during the first pandemic of the XXI century.
