International media dig into the B-side of the Milei promise

Little by little, the news about Argentina in the world’s business capitals is becoming less shiny than it was a few months ago. President Javier Milei is no longer a promise but a person who must deliver. Based on a battery of stories in recent days, the international press in Buenos Aires has decreed that his honeymoon is over.

The Financial Times was the most explicit. “Milei’s market honeymoon ends as investors question economic plan,” reads the headline. Correspondent Ciara Nugent writes: “Delays in building up foreign currency reserves will slow the government’s plan to lift currency controls — a prerequisite for foreign investment and significant economic growth — and increase the likelihood that the government will have to default on more than US$9 billion in repayments on its foreign currency debt next year.”

Reports on the country’s troubled macroeconomics, which dominated the news coming out of the country in the initial months of the Milei administration, are triggering a growing interest in microeconomics, as represented by the daily lives of Argentines amid a massive recession. The Associated Press described the current situation as “the worst economic crisis in decades” with people putting their “ingenuity to the test” to make ends meet. Reporters Almudena Calatrava and Isabel Debre tell the stories of people who set up portable toilets at street demonstrations or became teachers for would-be stars of the online sex fantasies platform OnlyFans.

Bloomberg News explored another angle of the country’s economic dilemma. A story bylined by Kevin Simauchi and Ignacio Olivera Doll this week showed how, due to an overvalued peso versus the US dollar, Argentines are flocking to Chile to shop for everything from “laptops, blue jeans, underwear, towels, frying-pans, forks, spoons, knives or … whatever could be frantically pulled off store shelves.”

“For thousands of Argentines, Chile has become the new go-to shopping centre. They’re rushing over the border in unprecedented numbers, shopping at a dizzying clip and highlighting, in the process, an alarming development for President Javier Milei and his aides back in Buenos Aires,” the journalists write. “The peso is overvalued.”

This news is emerging as the public’s concerns gradually shift away from inflation, which was dominant during the last few years, to the impact that the Milei administration’s anti-inflationary policy is having on economic activity and thus jobs. A poll by the San Andrés University released this week showed that poverty and low wages are now the public’s main concern, surpassing inflation for the first time in three years. This poll and a survey-of-record study conducted by the Torcuato Di Tella University also show Milei’s approval ratings declining slightly, but still in a solid terrain close to 50%.

So far, Milei has enjoyed sharing stories about him in the international media on his social media. He does it under the ironic hashtag “Fenómeno barrial” or “local (neighbourhood) phenomenon,” a line used by a political opponent in the past to downplay his influence. Every time he is featured abroad, as when he was placed on the cover of Time magazine in May, Milei boasts about his global leadership status.

But just as the Time article by Vera Bergengruen was, behind the glitz of the cover photo, full of criticism of his past and present, Milei might start to notice that not all publicity or fame is for the good, be it of himself or the country. Past the period of global novelty, Milei is beginning to be measured by the outcome of his policies and governance on Argentines and on investors’ interests.

If results get hard to come by, more people will start looking at other reproachable aspects of the Milei presidency, which so far are mostly overlooked. This week, the local office of Amnesty International sent a letter to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) arguing that the President’s constant attacks on individual journalists on social media 

amounted to an attack on the press and freedom of expression. The 12-page letter asked the IACHR to consider recommending that the President abstain from criminalising journalists. The President retorted that he is just an ordinary citizen expressing his views. He is not. He will not be judged as one.

* Marcelo J. García is a political analyst and Director for the Americas for the risk consultancy Horizon Engage.

--TIMES