It's always good to have an ally and advisor like Ramiro Marra, the forty-year-old son of the founder of the Bull Market broker ("bull market", i.e. bull market) in Buenos Aires. Around his office, in a modern high-rise in Puerto Madero, on the banks of the Río de la Plata, adorned with photos of the famous bronze bull of Wall Street, swarm the young social media lynxes of the new libertarian right argentina They wear T-shirts with the slogan "Damn freedom". Some go on hoverboard electric scooters.
If it weren't for his youthful energy, Javier Milei, the candidate who usually defines himself as an anarcho-capitalist, would not be the favorite ten days before the first round of the elections in Argentina, which are held this Sunday. Some deftly manage the campaign on Tik Tok and Instagram with stunts and more or less fake news to spread Milei's project to decimate the State, dollarize the economy and unleash the elemental forces of pure capitalism against the so-called "caste".
Marra, candidate of La Llibertat Avança, Milei's party, in the legislative elections in Buenos Aires, takes advantage of his investment channel, Dólar Hoy, to support the libertarian's radical plan. “Don't save in pesos!” he defiantly announced last week, bold advice at a time of accelerated currency depreciation that has pushed annual inflation up to 140%. Everything goes to viralize the central message: Milei is the disruptive candidate, the real punk rocker, even though the rocker group he belonged to in his youth was limited to covering the Rolling Stones.
But the rebel financiers and young network activists in Puerto Madero will not be enough for Milei to gain power, at least in a lasting way. For this it is necessary to count on the support of fatter fish. Milei already caused astonishment when he announced a pact, of surprising opportunism, with the union leader and clientelistic politician Luis Barrionuevo, the robot portrait of the caste against which the candidate lashes out.
But he also needs the support of big businessmen and financiers more established than Marra. Paradoxically, this can be more difficult. "Obviously, the economic elite sees Milei's pro-marketed program very favorably," said economist Fabián Amici, a technician at a development bank in Buenos Aires. "But there is a problem: many think the guy is crazy."
Misgivings are logical. The dollarization plan seems delusional given the absence of the necessary currencies to replace the national money supply. The proposal to close the central bank – taken from the manuals of anarcho-capitalism of the eccentric US post-war economist Murray Rothbard – is, for most economists, delusional.
Milei's iconic chainsaw - actually copied from a campaign by Rand Paul, the Republican senator in the USA - raises the fear that the same businessmen and bankers could also end up being slaughtered, in an Argentinian version of The Texas Slaughter. "Many entrepreneurs are afraid," added Amici in an interview held at the Exedra coffee shop in downtown Buenos Aires. Marra and other advisers to the candidate defend measures that "if adopted would lead us directly to hyperinflation". Nor does it help to calm the nerves of entrepreneurs that two years ago, Marra, a cryptocurrency fanatic like many of Milei's followers, predicted on the Dólar Hoy website that bitcoin would reach $100,000 (it now hovers around 20,000).
This explains the trip that Milei made at the beginning of the month to the beach town of del Plata, where Coloquio Idea, the most important business event of the year, is being organized, a kind of Davosargentí.
Unlike his two main rivals in the presidential elections, the center-left Peronist Sergio Massa and the conservative Patricia Bullrich, Milei refused to participate publicly in the conference, aware that it could damage his image as an outsider. "Coloquio Idea has never treated me well", he protested.
But he did decide to meet privately with the businessmen at a restaurant whose name perfectly summed up the tone of the campaign: Fury.
About seventy businessmen and financiers attended the event organized by Milei's most powerful ally among the financial class, Juan Napoli, president of Banco de Valores, which managed to attract characters such as Cristino Rattazzi, former president of Fiat Argentina; Daniel Funes, from the powerful business association Unión Industrial Argentina, and two executives from Richmond Laboratories, the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the Russian Sputnik vaccine. Financiers from Banco de Galicia, from Cohen, financial allies and the former CEO of HSBC in the country also went.
But Milei didn't do much to allay fears in his speech at the Furia restaurant. He insisted on the viability of his more anarcho-capitalist ideas: "Closing the central bank is an immovable measure." He also insisted that the vertiginous depreciation of the peso is not a problem: "The higher the dollar is, the easier it will be to dollarize." According to direct witnesses, the attending businessmen were not very convinced.
In a very Argentinian paradox, the elite that, by social class logic, should support Milei is preparing a flight of capital. "Many people are already putting their capital in liquid assets, in dollars, so that they can withdraw it if Milei wins in the first round", said Amici. A banker at the meeting in Mar del Plata, consulted by the newspaper Página Doce, summarized the dilemma: "We all share Milei's vision; the issue is how to do it".
