How is public spending cut? With a chainsaw. The noisy device has already become the emblem of the campaign of the far-right Javier Milei, the favorite candidate in the Argentine presidential elections on October 22. The ultraliberal economist intensifies his tours of municipalities on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, traditional Peronist fiefdoms. He makes caravans in areas where it is difficult to find the welfare state that Milei intends to end. In fact, this populist leader proposes practically ending the State, reducing it to a minimum.
Perched on a truck, Milei, candidate for the La Libertad Avanza party, takes a mass bath dressed in his black rocker jacket and lifting the chainsaw, with the engine on but without the chain that makes the machine dangerous. His followers surround him, enthusiastic and excited about his groundbreaking proposals.
The anarcho-capitalist politician, follower of the Austrian school, wants to eliminate the Argentine peso, dollarize the country and close the Central Bank; “eliminate 90% of current taxes”; remove all taxes on agricultural exports; privatize the health system; eliminate public education and replace it with vouchers so that families without resources go to private schools; close or privatize “all public companies.”
It also proposes “the total elimination of state public works, replacing it with a private initiative scheme”; end energy subsidies; or close eleven ministries and leave only eight portfolios, including a newly created one, the Ministry of Human Capital that would encompass the powers of Education, Health, Labor and Social Development. The other seven ministries would be: Economy, Justice, Interior, Security, Defense, Foreign Affairs and Infrastructure.
Milei dreams of getting rid of the “political caste” with his chainsaw. “With the same old people we will become the largest slum in the world,” he said a few weeks ago when he formally presented his proposals, along with his candidate for vice president, the ultra-Catholic lawyer Victoria Villarruel, who justifies the dictatorship and defends re-criminalizing the abortion.
However, and although his manner at rallies continues to be shocking, Milei has somewhat moderated his ultra-liberal speech, especially to secure the vote of the lower class, where he has a large pool of votes despite being a traditionally Peronist sector.
In this way, it has entered into contradictions by guaranteeing that it will not eliminate subsidies for low incomes, taking into account that 40% of the population is below the poverty line. “Eliminating welfare is a crime,” he said. “We must go in the long term to private health and education systems and we must aspire to eliminate direct social assistance but that cannot happen until Argentina is a prosperous country,” added Milei, whose proposal to reduce public spending is 15 % of GDP.
“Argentina has not changed at all in the last ten years and the places where there is room to cut without screwing up people's lives remain the same, because the politicians' jobs (privileges) are still intact, so politicians should tremble because they are running out. the job,” Milei has also said during the campaign.
One of the surveys published this week – from the company Proyección – gives almost 34% of the votes to Milei, a percentage that rises to almost 40% among young people between 16 and 34 years old – in Argentina you can vote from the age of 16 –, mostly men. According to the same survey, the outsider candidate also gathers support in geographically isolated areas of the country and among people who did not finish high school.
This survey places second, with 29%, the conservative Peronist Sergio Massa, current Minister of Economy, while the right-wing candidate, the former Montonero guerrilla and former Macrista Security Minister Patricia Bullrich, would obtain 24%. Both are fighting for a place in a possible second round against Milei. Tonight (early morning in Spain) the candidates will meet for the first time in the first of the mandatory debates.
Milei has a transversal vote, as demonstrated when on August 13 he won the mandatory primaries for all parties, where he reached close to 30% of the votes. The transversality of the vote in the different social segments is a common characteristic with other far-right leaders and movements in the world, such as the American Trump, the Brazilian Bolsonaro or Vox in Spain, with whom Milei maintains close ties. In fact, this week she has received the support of Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, through a video where the son of the former president of Brazil shows a Milei doll with a chainsaw.
“I didn't come to guide lambs, I came to awaken lions,” Milei repeats. Before the chainsaw, the first symbol of his presidential aspirations was that of a lion, which already highlighted the aggressive character of a candidate who became popular for his shrill vehemence in television talk shows, which, together with some details of his life, It revealed a certain emotional instability of the candidate, who is now 52 years old.
The journalist Juan Luis González published this year a biography of Milei with an expressive title: El loco (Planeta). Crazy is what her schoolmates called the candidate, who bullied her during a violent childhood in which she suffered beatings from her father.
“What happens if an unstable leader appears in an unstable country?” González asks in the book, where he presents Milei as a lonely character for much of his life and with an unhealthy love for his dog Conan, an English mastiff. who died in 2017 but who managed to clone to create at least four other mastiffs identical to the ones he lives with today: Murray, Milton, Robert and Lucas.
“With him and only with him she spent a dozen Christmases and New Years,” writes González, who explains that, when Conan died, Milei hired a medium to remain in contact with the dog and then her sister Karina – her all-powerful boss. campaign – delved into spiritualism to act as an intermediary between her brother and the deceased dog, with whom today the candidate who has the most numbers of reaching the Casa Rosada claims to speak with from the afterlife.
