By nature, politicians are a quarrelsome lot. Many spend their waking hours scheming against fellow members of their own party because they suspect they are only pretending to support them but would very much like to overtake them in the race to the top. This means that unless they need to close ranks against a common foe, things can easily get out of hand.
In democratic countries, leaders of a ruling party that has little to fear from an opposition in disarray soon find themselves confronting internal rebellions. This is what happened to the British Tories before Labour got its act together. Here in Argentina, Javier Milei’s party finds itself in a similar situation. Neither the Peronists nor the coalition that had confronted them in the run-up to last year’s election have recovered from the shock they received when the libertarian overhauled both of them. For now at any rate, Milei can feel free to ignore them.
Though La Libertad Avanza remains very much a one-man show whose card-carrying members feel obliged to pay homage to the boss’s Austrian-inspired economic theories, insiders say it is seething with factional squabbles, with people holding positions in the government fighting hard to prevent intruders from encroaching on what they assume is their turf. While most disputes seem to have more to do with personal rivalries than anything else, the one that is fast developing between Milei and his vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, does owe something to genuine policy differences. This was made clear when the lady fiercely attacked Federal Judge Ariel Lijo – the man who, for reasons that are hard to pin down, Milei wants to see promoted to the Supreme Court – by insisting that he lacked the academic credentials and, worse still, the moral fibre the job demanded.
Villarruel is a conservative nationalist with close family ties to the military who dislikes both the British and the French. According to the opinion polls, she strikes people as being a safe pair of hands and enjoys even more public support than Milei himself. This explains the hostile attitude towards her from the President’s highly influential sister, Karina Milei, who for decades has given her brother all the emotional support he needs and evidently thinks that to protect him she must keep the attractive vice-president at arm’s length. Does this matter very much? It could in the medium term if people start seeing Villarruel as a solid alternative to an unstable president whose talents in the economic field are not matched by any discernible political ones.
This is unfortunate. For Milei to transform Argentina into a “liberal,” let alone a “libertarian” stronghold – in which the public sector takes a back seat and allows private enterprise, disciplined by the markets, to work its wonders as it has in many parts of the rest of the world – he will need to be supported by a broad-based political party rather than a hastily assembled assortment of people who, for a variety of reasons, were quick to see him as a potential winner. Just how many are true believers in the Austrian creed Milei adopted is impossible to say, though it may be that by now most share his view that fiscal deficits are terribly bad, feeding inflation by printing huge amounts of money is stupid, price controls are useless and full-blooded socialism failed dismally whenever it was put to the test.
However, as Milei’s government has already discovered, simply promising to do things properly in future is not enough to persuade major investors to bet on Argentina becoming the next big thing. On his many appearances abroad, Milei has been effusively lionised by billionaires and liberal politicians (outside the United States, “liberal” does not mean “left-wing”) who greatly like what he has to say, but they have yet to hand him much in the way of money.
All are waiting to see if he will manage to overcome the political obstacles that lie ahead. For understandable reasons, they are sceptical; Argentine governments, among them the recent one headed by Mauricio Macri, have often told the world that they were leaving happy-go-lucky populism behind them so cash-rich businessmen would be well-advised to be among the first to take advantage of the marvellous opportunities that would soon arise, only for the would-be reformers to come a cropper the moment living standards fell and be replaced by Peronists determined to put the clock back to 1946 or thereabouts.
Milei is better placed than was his equally liberal predecessor, Macri, in large measure because Argentina seems to have touched rock bottom. This may be an illusion – the experience of another splendidly-endowed country, Venezuela, shows that it is always possible to keep falling until 90 percent or so of those who did not flee on time live in extreme poverty – but if enough people are convinced that it would be senseless to backtrack, Argentina could recover from her many self-inflicted wounds. Nonetheless, there is a big difference between setting sights on becoming a “normal” capitalist country with an efficient civil service and public institutions that are fit for purpose, and trying to abolish such accoutrements for ideological reasons, which is what Milei says he wants to do.
Like Macri before him, Milei understands that to reach his objectives he will have to win the hearts and minds of many, though not necessarily most, of his compatriots, hence the “culture war” he and his followers are vigorously waging. In this endeavour they have enjoyed much success. Even though many are put off by Milei’s crudity and the tendency to see everything in black and white that induces him to hurl derogatory epithets at people who by and large are on his side, he has reportedly made deep inroads among the young in many extremely poor districts that were once in thrall to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The Peronists have helped him in this endeavour not only by governing the country in such a disastrously incompetent fashion but also by committing countless acts of corruption and, in a string of notorious cases, grossly mistreating women who were unfortunate enough to fall into the clutches of some of their most prominent representatives.
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