The street battles that have erupted in Buenos Aires after more than a year of relative calm tell us a great deal about the forces fighting for Argentina’s future. As government spokespeople lost no time in pointing out, by taking advantage of what even supporters of Javier Milei’s cost-cutting policies recognise is a legitimate cause for complaint, the Peronists – helped by large numbers of hooligans wearing the shirts of their favourite football clubs – are doing their best to claim the moral high ground. This is something they did previously with considerable success, when Mauricio Macri was president; the allegedly pro-pensioner riots of December 2017 put his government, which until then had been fairly successful, on the back foot. It never recovered.
Milei thinks he is made of sterner stuff than Macri. Unlike him, he – along with his feisty Security Minister Patricia Bullrich – is more than willing to order baton-wielding cops and gendarmes to wade into demonstrators despite warnings that, should they bludgeon any to death, public opinion could swing sharply against the government as it did on June 25, 2002, when Eduardo Duhalde occupied the Pink House and two protestors were killed. On that occasion, Duhalde reacted by throwing in the towel, but Milei has let it be known that he has no intention of doing the same. His determination to stay the course is greatly strengthened by his evident belief that he has nothing in common with wishy-washy pragmatists such as Duhalde, who follow the rules of the political “caste” that he and many others say came close to turning Argentina into a poverty-stricken wasteland like Venezuela.
Many who deplore Milei’s often loutish behaviour agree that neither the Peronists nor the street-fighting heavies that do their bidding care a hoot for the plight of old folk who are struggling to get by on a pittance. Though most people would like to see them get much more, few can be unaware that, for this to happen, the government would have to get its hands on far more money than is currently available. Milei, like his predecessors, whether Peronist, Radical or military, has chipped away at pensions and social-welfare entitlements because he feels that refusing to do so would have some very bad consequences. He would surely have been delighted to order big increases and be universally praised for his humanitarian sentiments, but long before reaching the presidency, he knew that a shortage of cash would make it impossible. This is still the case. As he enjoys pointing out, in this part of the world money is in desperately short supply.
When Milei took office, many people both here and abroad took it for granted that the ferocious squeeze on public spending he promised would soon lead to turmoil on the streets and a premature end to his stint as president. They assumed that austerity would detonate the “social explosion” pessimists have been predicting for almost a century. To their surprise, nothing much happened until barely a week ago when, after remaining quiet and licking their wounds, Milei’s most dangerous enemies realised that – due in large measure to the crypto-currency imbroglio he and his sister had got themselves involved in – his prestige was waning and took it for a sign that the time had come for them to mount their long-awaited counteroffensive.
Will they succeed in dislodging the chainsaw man? If the protests continue and gather strength, they certainly could. Would this mean that pensioners, especially those who made no contributions to the official system, could see their meagre incomes increase? Unfortunately for them, the chances of this happening are less than zero. Even if a future government did decide that they all deserved to be given much more, inflation would immediately gobble up whatever they received. To make matters even worse, after coming to the conclusion that Argentina would continue to behave like a drug addict more interested in getting the next fix than in making an effort to pull herself together, investors big and small would take their money to somewhere safer.
Like his idol, Donald Trump, Milei is a flawed character. The same can be said about his homemade ideology, which is a heady cocktail of libertarianism and Austrian economic theory spiced with ingredients of mystical origin. It is unlikely to work in the long run, but so far his efforts to apply it have had many beneficial effects. Inflation has slowed greatly and it would seem that much of the population has finally understood that it is foolish for governments to overspend grossly for supposedly moral reasons. If nothing else, Milei has managed to apply a much-needed corrective to a political order that, until he took over, seemed to have been programmed to destroy both itself and the country.
Just how long Milei and his team of oddballs will remain in power is anybody’s guess. If the street riots sponsored by defenders of the terribly corrupt old order peter out, he could do well in the forthcoming legislative elections and remain in power for almost three or seven more years. And then? With luck, he could be followed by a decent conservative or social-democrat government committed not just to tough-minded economic realism but also to keeping the country’s institutional framework intact and making it more efficient. Another possibility would be a resurgence of the movements that did so much to bring Argentina close to collapse. Despite all the harm the Peronists and others like them have done, they are still backed by a considerable proportion of the electorate. Milei won in 2023 because much of the population was fed up with the crass populism whose standard-bearer was Sergio Massa, but even so his famously untrustworthy opponent garnered a far higher percentage of the votes than the Labour Party of Sir Keir Starmer did in the United Kingdom when it won “by a landslide,” or, for that matter, the Christian Democrats of Friedrich Merz recently in Germany.
This being the case, it would be folly to regard the Peronists as a busted flush. Unless Milei and would-be allies such as Mauricio Macri are careful, they could easily return to power though, of course, it is entirely possible that before doing so the most influential leaders of the shape-shifting movement that has dominated public life since its birth three-quarters of a century ago could dump Kirchnerism and readopt Menemism, and by so doing reduce the risk of Argentina reverting to the feckless populism that made the previous government so awful.
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