According to political consultant Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí, the traditional “honeymoon stage” politicians enjoy with society has been quickly shortening over the past several decades. Whereas they had been tracked to last 26 months in the past, towards the latter part of the 20th century, that figure had fallen to a mere seven months, according to a Gallup poll cited by the political strategist who worked on Peronist Sergio Massa’s unsuccessful presidential bout. Today in Argentina, it could be much, much shorter.
The “first hundred days” were a typical political landmark for newly minted presidents, giving them some breathing-room to gain their footing, put their teams in place and get going. Yet, in this eternal campaign that saw the most prepared candidate throw his hat in the ring too early, only to get absolutely clobbered in the primaries, it was none other than Horacio Rodríguez Larreta who coined the concept of “the first hundred hours” as the most critical in making sure the rookie president would succeed in putting in place an ambitious reform package that would finally get Argentina out of the structural labyrinth it has been stuck in for nearly a century.
Timing, it seems, wasn’t Rodríguez Larreta’s forte, yet time does appear as the quintessential category of life, something that is extremely explicit in the context of Argentina’s socio-political-economic process. In some way, the velocity of change is correlated, if not directly caused, by unrelenting inflation, which feels as if it will never come down.
No-one can predict how long Javier Milei’s honeymoon period will last, but it does appear to be softening a bit. The outsider libertarian and wild-haired economist caused a sensation in Argentina’s political scene and in just two years went from TV talking head to president, first managing to rip apart the surefire winner, the Juntos por el Cambio coalition, and then taking on a pan-Peronist front in control of the powerful state apparatus. In great part due to absolutely superior social media capabilities, Milei became the voice of the people who denounced the privileges of “the caste,” earning for himself the most powerful political weapon of the moment: being able to single handedly determine who is included in that toxic category. His three-staged victory — taking the lead in the PASO primaries with 30 percent of the vote, retaining those votes but sliding into second place in the general election, and finally absorbing the anti-Peronist vote to beat Massa with 56 percent of the vote in the run-off — strengthened his position, giving the congressionally and electorally weak Milei a solid mandate for change.
A poll put together by Zubán Córdoba political consultancy illustrates the initial intensity of Milei’s honeymoon. Asked how they viewed the national government, 65.7 percent had a negative opinion by the time of the transfer of power, while 11.4 percent had a positive predisposition. Thirty days on, Milei has managed to more than triple the positives, taking them to 39.3 percent and nearly tying the 42.3 percent that view the national government negatively.
The first anarcho-capitalist president is far from where Alberto Fernández was when he took office, though. A report from Opinaia political consultancy from 2020 cited in Perfil indicated the Fernández-Fernández administration counted with a 59-percent approval (41 percent disapproval) rate a month into taking office. In a slightly different measure, Mauricio Macri came into office with a 71 percent personal approval rate in early 2016 (18 percent disapproval), which was better than Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in December 2007 when she assumed her presidency, and a single percentage point below her 2008 figures, according to Poliarquía data cited by the Política Argentina website.
Milei is therefore in a tough spot. He is the least popular president one month into his tenure counting the past four cycles, including two administrations led by Fernández de Kirchner. The context doesn’t help him either, taking office in an incredibly complex macroeconomic environment given the successive failures of the last three presidential terms. Society is also hyper-polarised and further disillusioned with the political class. And, ultimately, Milei represents an extreme shift of the pendulum that is more repulsive to his political opponents than his more traditional predecessors which polarised with a smaller portion of their antagonistic electorates.
A phenomenon of this “liquid modernity,” Milei, sister Karina, his four English mastiffs and the rest of his political team may have read Gutiérrez-Rubí’s column about the breakdown of Gabriel Boric’s honeymoon in Chile. “One of the major challenges in politics in this day and age is its relationship with an extremely scarce resource: time,” he wrote in La Tercera. “There is no more room for transition [periods] and the sedimentation of decisions. Everything has to be immediate and instantaneous. In this context of instant democracy, we lose causal reference; the speed of the response becomes more important than the final outcome,” he added.
During his first month in office, Milei understood this perfectly, along with the weakness of his position, making him pragmatic enough to bring Luis ‘Toto’ Caputo onboard to execute an alternative economic plan to what he had in mind, and throw the one-two punch of the DNU emergency decree and the so-called ‘Omnibus Law’ bill to Congress in order to retain momentum.
Now, the president and his cabinet must face the music. They have begun to weave alliances in Congress and to accept potential amendments to their massive, 1,000-article dual piece of legislation that was nothing more than a declaration of intent. They may even succeed in getting several of their reforms approved. They also understand that society is bearing the brunt of their economic policies, not the political caste as he had promised.
If their strategy goes according to plan, inflation would begin to drop somewhere between the second and third quarter. Milei has already stated that “two-thirds of the improvements” will be reaped in 15 years. Paola Zubán, head of the eponymous consultancy firm mentioned above, indicated that their latest figures suggest Milei’s image has been sliding at a rate of one percentage point daily, and that while he retains the support of his electorate a majority of them are against many of his leading policy decisions including the major points of the DNU and omnibus bill, the privatisation of state-owned companies, the striking of laws regulating rentals, labour markets and the pension system, as she noted in an interview with AM1270 radio station.
What is the least bad option, sudden death or death by a million cuts? How much pain can society tolerate all at once with the promise that there is light at the end of the tunnel? “In this moment of generalised fatigue, if politics doesn’t offer immediate reward, we enter into a state of frustration, anxiety, and discontent that threatens the quality of our democracies,” Gutiérrez-Rubí explains. “There is a risk in that time has lost its seal of quality, surpassed by daily contingencies. Speed is not only necessary but also indispensable in politics, yet ‘turbo-politics’ can become a grave danger if leaders and society succumb to digital rankings [of engagement and popularity], daily obsession with opinion polls, and frenetic action as the great organising forces of the future,” he concluded.
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