President Javier Milei returns home today from a stellar week abroad in which his international and domestic prestige reached new peaks, starting with being one of the few world leaders privileged to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington on Monday and featuring a fiery speech whose temperatures contrasted with the snows covering much of the Northern Hemisphere to an expectant global elite at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss ski resort of Davos – and yet all that glitters is not gold (with much of the Argentine share of that precious metal currently lodged in the coffers of the Bank of England). Yet again Milei has wasted chances to promote overseas investment at an international forum by preaching to the converted about the global hazards allegedly faced by a capitalism triumphant even in China, instead of placing more direct pressures on potential investors by spelling out the concrete opportunities, thus allowing them to persist in their comfortable “wait and see” stance.
Much the same spiel as last year’s Davos harangue from President Milei with “wokeism” replacing “socialism” as his target being the main variation but in a very different context. Last year he was an eccentric mop-head with only five weeks in office arousing more curiosity than real interest while at least one leading financial daily abroad hinted that he was on the brink of losing his marbles altogether by writing a massive article on Vice-President Victoria Villarruel with the barely concealed subtext that she could soon be Argentina’s next leader. “The West is in danger,” Milei told a perplexed audience including many top CEOs more interested in when his libertarian government was going to lift the ‘cepo’ currency and capital controls (which it has yet to do).
Milei arrived in Davos last Wednesday with far more under his belt from the last 12 months. Last January the most recent monthly inflation figure was 25.5 percent while this time round it was 2.7 percent – an obvious gain for a credibility already magnified by a single-minded determination to post a fiscal surplus month after month last year. A success achieved without permanent sacrifice of growth with a huge contrast between his two Davos appearances – last January the “chainsaw” was already at work with a steep recession the only possible outcome of the brutal austerity whereas Milei now returned to Switzerland on the back of partial recovery in the second half of last year with every prospect of 2025 being a bumper year turning the corner into growth.
The all-out onslaught against “woke” warrants more analysis. Like all mass movements “woke” has its lunatic fringe with such moves as the recent New York initiative to cancel Beethoven unless orchestras give equal time to the compositions of black women or rewriting history in order to introduce a non-existent racial diversity into high societies in times of worldwide slavery – saner critics merely deplore such excesses while others seek to throw out the baby with the bathwater by depicting them as the sum and substance of “woke.” But Milei’s Davos address adopted neither tack, going much further – in his perfervid view, everything in the “woke” baggage is an elegant excuse to advance the state, whether good, bad or ugly, or, in his words, “feminism, equality, gender ideology, climate change, abortion and immigration are all heads of the same monster.” Otherwise, Milei spent almost as much time defending “his dear friend, the wonderful Elon Musk” as Western civilisation and sought to present himself as being something of a pioneer and architect of “an international alliance of all nations who embrace the ideas of freedom” when all the allies he named (Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump) predate him.
With the second Donald Trump presidency only five days old, everything still lies in the future for the friendship between Milei and the Republican tycoon (and between the latter and Musk for that matter) but it may not be as cosy as their international alignment might suggest. One potential clash already emerged in this first week when Milei’s commitment to free trade is so total that he now threatens to leave Mercosur if the regional trade bloc obstructs a free-trade agreement with a United States Trump has vowed to convert into a protectionist bunker. Potential contradictions which may not emerge while negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are at the forefront but are only likely to multiply in the remaining 207 weeks of the Trump presidency.
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