Milei government dismisses responsibility for jump in poverty rate

President Javier Milei's government went on the defensive on Friday as it denied responsibility for rising poverty in Argentina.

Poverty in Argentina reached 52.9 percent of the population in the first half of 2024, a sharp increase of 11.2 percentage points compared to the same period in 2023, the INDEC national statistics bureau reported the previous day.

Extreme poverty rose 6.2 points year-on-year to 18.1 percent.

The number”‘is the consequence of 20 years of populism and destruction ... we took on the disaster and we are correcting it,’ said Presidential Spokesperson Manuel Adorni at his daily press conference.

The spokesman said that, according to undisclosed data from the Ministry of Human Capital, poverty reached “maximum peaks of almost 55 percent in the first quarter.”

Based on that statement, he claimed that the government had managed to reduce it in the second quarter of the year.

“We were coming from the abyss,” Adorni said, downplaying the social impact of the government's fiscal adjustment measures.

In the first three months of the year, Argentina recorded a fiscal surplus of 0.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product, albeit at the cost of a contraction that caused GDP to slump 1.7 percent in the second quarter compared to the previous one, deepening the ongoing recession.

Adorni stressed Friday that “the big adjustment has already been mad.”

“Today that adjustment is going to be much more surgical, area by area,” he explained. 

However, he clarified, for the government “the chainsaw has no end.”

The chainsaw was a symbol of Milei's election campaign to promote his policy of fiscal rigour.

“Whatever we can cut, we will cut until the last day of our existence in our government,” Adorni stressed.

 – TIMES/AFP