On his international debut, Javier Milei came out swinging against the scourge of global “socialism,” telling the Davos crowd that they are the true heroes of this world by creating wealth through private enterprise.
Milei’s tone and body language suggested the first-ever ultra-libertarian president of Argentina was deadly convinced of what he was saying, preaching to the elites of the so-called ‘Western World’ that the threat of allowing “collectivism” to overcome “freedom” would result in calamitous ruin. As he finished his speech (which he read almost in its entirety, diluting his delivery), he closed with his usual kicker in a lower, scratchy voice. Almost embarrassed, he looked at his audience with his glasses sitting at the tip of his nose and uttered “Viva la libertad carajo!” – a relatively vulgar statement for a head of state in any official activity.
Milei was this year’s star at Davos, to the point that when he met the International Monetary Fund’s top authorities, Kristalina Georgieva and Gita Gopinath, they pulled out their mobile phones and snapped some selfies with the Argentine president, forgetting for a moment that they were meeting the head of the multilateral lender’s largest debtor state.
The global reaction was immediate and polarised along the lines of the new “grieta” or antagonistic dialectic that is taking over Argentina and the world. For many who read his words as the delusions of a madman who is stuck in time, Milei’s speech was embarrassing and an example that the president was following in the footsteps of other politically incorrect right-wing populists like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. For others, it was a brilliant piece of oratory in which someone finally stood up against the elites to denounce the obvious truths hidden in plain sight about the tyrannies of “wokeism.”
Who truly put Milei at the centre of the global scene — his speech was by far the most watched of the World Economic Forum, with more than 10 times the number of views than French President Emanuel Macron’s intervention, for example — was billionaire Elon Musk, who first tweeted: “Good explanation of what makes countries more or less prosperous,” accompanied by the video, later adding an automatically dubbed version in English using artificial intelligence. To cap it off, Musk, an expert “troll,” went “full meme”: he tweeted an image of a couple having sex while the man, supposedly distracted during the act, had a computer on where he was watching the speech accompanied by the phrase, “so hot rn [i.e. “right now”].” The Internet, predictably, exploded.
Is the content of his speech what is truly relevant, forcing analysts to spend pages and pages analysing his every word? Maybe there’s something else that should be at the centre of the discussion tied to the effectiveness of Milei’s message, which isn’t the same thing as what he’s actually saying. Indeed, back in 2019 when his chances of becoming president appeared to be non-existent, Milei gave almost the exact same speech at a local TED talk.
Traditional models of political communication are centred on oratory, where the leader constructs logical arguments that can later be interpreted using logical deduction, both setting expectations and rallying support for future policy. The capacity to spread this message was linear in some sort of way, tied to the capacity of analogue mass media including radio, television, newspapers and magazines. In a digital ecosystem characterised by infinite reach, the conditions of success are defined in relation to the capacity to go viral. And probably the most effective way for that to happen is to become a meme that is then retweeted by Elon Musk. On social media, Milei’s “on-platform metrics” are second to none, especially when it comes to reach and engagement, which is why he tweeted out statistics on digital viewership of his speech showing outsized performance against his competitors. The politician as a social media influencer, of which there are few like Milei (and Trump).
The veracity of his speech and the soundness of his arguments are less important than which side of the polarised spectrum the viewer is on. At Davos, the president spoke to world leaders, yes, but much more important was the capacity to take this content to the Internet where he is a global star supported by Musk. The message to his followers is that he is in line with the world’s right-wing populists who are opposed to politically correct conceptions grounded in the idea of social justice, including feminism and climate change.
Twitter (now called X) is not a good platform for long-form text or for profound debate. What excel on social media are strong emotions, especially negative ones, and memes. Musk, who is the world’s richest man and the founder of some of the most successful companies, calls himself “chief troll officer” in his X bio — he acquired the struggling social media company in 2022 — and like Milei is an expert in the arts of Internet trolling.
“Internet troll: Internet users who communicate using off-topic or inflammatory messages to enrage individuals or groups or start an online war. Some trolls wander the web alone, looking for a fight to pick, while others storm forums and social media services in packs to disrupt conversations and push their agendas. Internet trolls don’t have a single modus operandi. They’ll attack a person no matter who they are, just for the sake of creating an argument, whether it’s on Twitter or during a Q&A session at an online conference,” reads a fairly good definition from NordVPN’s cybersecurity glossary.
Milei and his team will claim victory on this one, yet what awaits them back home is a completely different type of challenge. While they have been applying similar tactics on the domestic front, their powerful digital communications strategy cannot stop galloping inflation from obliterating Argentines’ purchasing power. Back with a self-perceived solid win from abroad, the wild haired-economist, his sister Karina, and the rest of the gang will have to deal with the nitty gritty reality of Argentine politics, where his lieutenants have been trying to figure out how to keep the administration’s agenda moving forward. For now, and while Musk’s retweets keep coming, that’s their problem.
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