If “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is one of Oscar Wilde’s many famous quotes, President Javier Milei would seem to be going the whole hog behind his United States counterpart Donald Trump. Not content with a copycat removal of Argentina from the World Health Organization (WHO) earlier this month (and also studying withdrawal from the Paris climate accords), he is sustaining Trump’s trademark reality show outburst of “You’re fired!” as a central pillar of his administration – not that this looks like earning him any reprieve from the Republican’s steel and aluminium tariffs. This past week has successively seen Sonia Cavallo dumped as ambassador to the Organisation of American States (OAS) for her father’s dissenting insistence on an overvalued currency and Mariano de los Heros ditched as ANSES social security administration chief for floating reform of the pension system.
Volatility would thus seem to be the middle name of this administration – the above are not isolated instances nor even among a dozen or so senior officials ejected in the last 14 months but rather tenfold that figure. Such precarious tenure would appear to run counter to the ruling party’s name of La Libertad Avanza because in this climate officials are likely to live in terror of freely expressing an opinion for fear of being shown the door. Moreover such paralysis would not only be limited to words but also to action, strangling any sense of initiative, quite apart from the time lost by new officials learning the ropes.
As the economy minister presiding over convertibility in the last decade of the past century, Domingo Cavallo was speaking from experience about the perils of an overvalued currency, but he was not alone in an opinion not only shared by orthodox economists but also by both rural and industrial productive sectors with the strain beginning to tell on both the balances of trade and payments. Nor is this spat between Milei and Cavallo the only recent instance of the like-minded being at daggers drawn – we now see national and City Security Ministers Patricia Bullrich and Waldo Wolff with almost identical law and order images at each other’s throats over recent prison breaks in this capital. A far cry from the polarisation of only a couple of years ago when the followers of ex-presidents Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Mauricio Macri aimed all their fire almost exclusively at each other. In conclusion regarding Sonia Cavallo, few people beyond the blindly loyal will endorse the sins of the father being visited on the children if there is any sin at all – especially among the moderate PRO-minded voters who clinched Milei’s run-off victory 15 months ago and whose support will be crucial in October’s midterms.
If Milei’s dismissal of an ANSES chief just over a year ago was a similar case of spite (Osvaldo Giordano because his wife had voted in Congress against some articles of the gigantic omnibus reform bill), this time around was slightly different – premised on nobody but the President being authorised to talk about policy. De los Heros did not even say that pension reform was around the corner but simply a work in progress, prompting Milei to deny even this or that the issue had any priority. It is true that pension reform is generally acknowledged as being a second-generation structural reform and Milei was also correct in saying that any talk of overhaul was premature with some 40 percent of the workforce outside any system of pension contributions (which almost as high a percentage of current pensioners have not made) but none of this justifies such an unacceptably extreme reaction – discreetly submitting the issue to an internal debate hopefully leading to consensus would seem a more normal procedure. Perhaps what really rattled Milei was mention of raising the retirement age in an electoral year since he is mindful of how politically sensitive an issue this has been in France in recent years.
Nevertheless, neither Milei nor Trump should be dismissed as hopeless cases because both have shown a capacity to backtrack. Milei has already recanted his blanket rejection of China (“sometimes you have to learn”) and this week has seen him steering through Congress a ‘ficha limpia’ bill against the candidacies of anybody with a confirmed conviction for corruption, when he had sabotaged similar legislation less than three months previously – thus helping to keep Argentina in a lowly 99th position out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index. But President Milei still has a steep learning curve ahead when it comes to political pragmatism.
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