Milei’s (unnecessary) enemies are piling up

Today is Día del Periodista (Journalists’ Day) in Argentina. Don’t expect great celebrations or greetings from Javier Milei’s Casa Rosada: the President and his followers have placed the profession at the top of a long and growing list of enemies, inviting Argentines to “hate” journalists as much as they possibly can.

Milei’s attacks on the press are causing international concern, albeit in a context in which the press is under fire from governments across the Western Hemisphere, starting with the once-beacon of press freedom, the United States. 

The Special Rapporteurship for Freedom of Expression at the Organization of American States (OAS) said in its recent annual report that there is “an accelerated deterioration of the environment for the exercise of freedom of expression in Argentina, characterised by the low tolerance of the Executive Branch towards criticism and deliberative processes.”

“The President of the Republic has sustained a recurrent and constant discourse of stigmatisation towards journalists and media, accusing them of being ‘corrupt,’ ‘criminals with microphones,’ ‘liars,’ ‘thieves,’ ‘defamers’ and ‘extortionists,’ among other labels,” continues the report. It also quotes him as having “publicly stated that 85 percent of the media lies all the time.”

Excluding 15 percent of the profession from this accusation explains why Milei feels comfortable giving interviews to a musical chairs system of friendly journalists, mostly from the television channels La Nación+, América24 and Todo Noticias, plus a handful of streamers who wholeheartedly support his government. There, Milei speaks at will, insults without limit, and gets good vibes in return.

Picking friendly interlocutors is not something exclusively attributed to Milei; on the contrary, it has become common practice. Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner also picked a “militant” journalist and TV channel for her cause this week to announce she will run for an obscure Buenos Aires Legislature seat in September. The interviewer was as excited as one can probably be on the air as he heard the news delivered out loud.

While Milei and Fernández de Kirchner increasingly have things in common, there is one aspect of the former’s approach that is increasingly concerning: the President is not only failing to make friends, he is accumulating too many enemies.

This week, a multi-cause march to Congress showed the diversity of peoples that feel attacked by Milei’s policies of extreme adjustment. The list includes pensioners, state workers, people with disabilities and their families, and hospital doctors, just to name a few. So far, nobody but themselves can represent their interests. During the announcement of her candidacy, Fernández de Kirchner acknowledged that the opposition’s main challenge is to listen to these demands and translate them into political action. She did not, however, tackle the fundamental question of whether she is the right person to do it, which is why she is fighting with Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof. As he moves toward a very likely victory in the midterm elections in October, Milei is offending too many people and relying on the fact that a vast majority of Argentines have decided to tune out of politics. This is, of course, unless politics impacts their lives, in the here and now.

It is well-known that Milei falls under the alt-right movement that aligns itself with Donald Trump in the United States, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary – leaders whom the Italian essayist Giuliano da Empoli described as “the engineers of chaos” who govern by “multiplying anger and frustration” among voters. 

Anger needs a target, and that is what Milei is mostly doing, all the time. The target is called Kirchnerism, his alleged symbol of excessive state intervention, corruption and inefficiency. Fernández de Kirchner does Milei a great favour by stepping back into the political arena.

The strategy, still, runs the risk of overstretching. Suddenly, medical doctors who save children’s lives, pensioners demanding higher pay, the country’s most popular actor who remarked on rising prices, shockingly even a 12-year-old autism awareness influencer are today accused of being evil Kirchnerites. Journalists, of course too, are par for the course. At this pace of conflict, Milei might conclude one day that everybody except him and his sister Karina are Kirchnerites. He would not be the first leader in Argentina’s history to suffer from autocratic paranoia. Otherwise, the attack on journalists, pensioners, scientists, paediatricians, doctors, the disabled and the autistic is a cynically calculated tactic – one that Milei will eventually have to change overnight when the going gets tougher, hoping the offended understand that it was just a silly political joke. By then, it may be too late.