Javier Milei speaks during a campaign rally in Buenos Aires, Argentina, November 2021Anita Pouchard Serra (Bloomberg)
The final landing of the ultra-liberal right as a political force in Argentina threatens to fail at the best moment. On June 10, the party, led by MP Javier Milei, prepared its first rally in Buenos Aires province to show its strength. But it all ended in a timid event that dissolved in the chill of the southern winter. What should have been a mass bath for La Libertad Avanza’s presidential candidate gathered no more than 1,500 people in a stadium with a capacity for ten times that. The draft fiasco sparked a battle within her party that was discussed in the media all week, leaving Milei alone to confront her greatest fear. The economist who bursts into politics as an MP and promises to “kick the ass out of the “political caste”” is, like everyone else, embroiled in the more traditional partisan struggles.
A third of Argentina’s 47 million people live in the province of Buenos Aires. The outskirts of the capital, where the wealthy lock themselves up in private quarters and the popular classes run the elections, is a totem of national politics. Who wins rules. Former President Mauricio Macri, whose candidate for governor María Eugenia Vidal won the province in 2015 and broke almost 30 years of Peronist hegemony, knows this; and Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who has her main voting base there, knows it. Milei, who jumped from the television studios to Congress last November and shouted, “They’re scared, the left are scared,” is now also clear that he wants to be president.
The failure to call its first rally in the Buenos Aires suburbs has exposed the tensions of a new party racing against the clock to arm itself ahead of 2023 elections across the country. On the one hand, his sister Karina, the Milei nicknames the chef and doesn’t hesitate to call him “the great architect” of her presentations; on the other, Carlos Maslatón, a liberal anti-quarantine advocate and bitcoin expert who defines himself as the “self-pointer” for the libertarian leader. Maslatón accused Karina Milei of being a “cheap and ignorant dictator” and warned that her leadership would lead the party to an “irreversible catastrophe”. Then he spent the last week explaining the crisis… with a Peronist analogy.
The last government of Juan Domingo Perón began in 1973 after 18 years of exile and ended with his death a year later. The Peronism that was built up in his absence was broad spectrum, with the guerrilla left on one side and the far right on the other. These antagonistic groups were waiting for an elderly Perón in frail health, returning to the countryside with his third wife, Isabel Martínez, and a sinister personal secretary: José López Rega. The Wizard, as they called him, was a minister in the government of both. From there he was associated with esoteric groups and was the founder of the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance, the Triple A, a far-right paramilitary organization responsible for eliminating left-wing opponents. The confidence of the Peróns was established by López Rega as shadow president during the hesitant 20 months of the government of Isabel Perón, the widow and successor, marked by the economic crisis and violent military pressure, which ended in the 1976 coup Maslatón, Karina Milei represents the “lopezreguismo ” that alienates the leader in front of the bases.
As one of the most visible spokesmen for the libertarian right explains to each microphone the internal struggle in the enemy’s keys, Karina Milei’s room remains silent. Javier Milei spent last week in Brazil attending a forum with Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of Brazilian far-right president and former Chilean candidate José Antonio Kast, and these days he was in Colombia supporting the campaign of businessman Rodolfo Hernández, rival of Gustavo Petro in the second round this Sunday. Outside the country, Milei has already made up her mind. “I’m reporting my sister. He’s the person who knows me best,” he warned in a television interview a few weeks ago. “One of the jokes we make is that I did all this so that she could be First Lady.”
Argentine MP Javier Milei with his sister Karina and Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the Brazilian President, in São Paulo this week.RR.SS.
Karina Milei’s ally is Carlos Kikuchi, a former adviser to Domingo Cavallo, the secretary of commerce who pushed through the convertibility of a dollar peso in the 1990s. Both are in charge of the national armed party. Without a structure to face the general election, they have looked to their would-be brothers for allies, such as Mauricio Macri’s right-wing. Milei seems keen to forge an alliance with the former president, despite describing him as a “socialist” in the past. Also the reactionary extreme right.
The alliance with the Republican Force, a conservative party in the north of the country founded by a military coup leader, isn’t the only controversy Milei has found himself in over the past month. Days after the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at a Texas school, he defended the right to carry guns. He then defended the sale of organs, considering it “a different market”. “Why can’t I make decisions about my body?” he asks, while opposing free abortion “because there’s an ownership issue.”
Javier Milei won two seats in Congress in last November’s general election. La Libertad Avanza won 17% of the vote in Buenos Aires, becoming the third force behind the grand coalitions of government and opposition, Peronism and Macrism. After the hectic past few weeks, his voting intention has dropped to 13 percent and half the country has a negative image of him, according to a poll by the newspaper La Nación. A year before the election, the country’s oldest newspaper is wondering if the local Trump phenomenon can remain a disruptive force. The guru of the national right, adviser Jaime Durán Barba, was asked to answer: “The white horse only has to run once, because if there are no spots.”