Milei won Argentina’s presidential election with a program that included cutting social benefits, laying off thousands of civil servants, cutting public spending, cutting the number of ministries in half, or devaluing the currency. While elsewhere in the world such promises would very likely bring a candidate clear electoral defeat, in Argentina, the country with the world’s long-term highest inflation and living on the brink of collapse for years, it worked. Mileia was supported by 55.6 percent of voters.
Javier Milei is famous for his unconventional style. At pre-election rallies, he wielded a chainsaw to demonstrate that, in his opinion, as president he would trim the overgrown state apparatus. He describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if he really means what he’s saying. During the campaign, for example, he claimed that he talked to his dead dog through a spirit medium, who advised him to run for president. He also expressed support for legalizing the trade in human organs. “It’s just another market,” he said. When asked if the trade in children should be legal, he responded: “It depends on the circumstances.”
Javier Milei with the chainsaw that became the symbol of his election campaign.|profimedia.cz
And Milei did not lose the power of his statements even after he was elected president. He called Pope Francis, his compatriot, an imbecile and a disgusting leftist. Argentina’s relations with many other South American countries have also worsened due to the president’s indiscriminate words against local politicians.
Javier Milea
- He was born on October 22, 1970 into a family of Italian origin.
- In his youth, he was actively involved in sports, he was the football goalkeeper of the Chacarita Juniors club. He also sang in the rock band Everest, which mainly played covers of Rolling Stones hits.
- He studied economics at the private University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires and at the University of Torcuato Di Tella. He is considered a specialist in economic growth and economic mathematics.
- He worked as an economist in several national and international public institutions, he was the chief economist in the private company Corporación América and in the Argentine branch of the HSBC bank.
- In 2019, he founded the Libertarian Party, on the basis of which he formed a coalition of libertarian and liberal parties, Freedom Advances. With her in 2021, he succeeded in the parliamentary elections for the first time and became an MP.
“The massacre in Venezuela is truly unheard of and the same is happening in a prison like Cuba. And then we have other examples that follow the same path… Let’s say, like the case of Colombia with Mr. Petr… well, what else can you expect from someone who was a terrorist and a murderer… a communist,” Milei said in an interview for CNN to address Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who was an M-19 rebel guerrilla that laid down its arms in 1990.
Argentine President Javier Milei visited the Tesla factory in Austin a few weeks ago and met with Elon Musk:
Argentine President Javier Milei visited the Tesla factory in Austin and met with Elon Musk • APF News
The new Argentine president has already started fulfilling his program. He devalued the peso in half, causing an immediate drop in living standards in the import-dependent country. He also ordered the suspension of a number of price regulations, reduced many subsidies and cut state investments.
The lower house of the Argentine parliament has also already supported the president’s package of reform laws known as the omnibus, which includes, for example, the reduction of business regulation or cuts in higher education. “It’s a crucial first step to get Argentina out of the quagmire it’s been in for the past decades,” Milei said after the vote. But he hasn’t won yet. Deputies must now vote on individual points of the reform, after which it must be approved by the Senate. And against the cuts in education, a large wave of protests with hundreds of thousands of people took place at the end of April.
While saving in education, Milei supports investments in defense. Recently, Argentina agreed with Denmark to purchase 24 older F-16 fighter jets. Milei appears as a very pro-Russian politician, shortly after his election, for example, he stopped plans for Argentina to join the BRICS association.
“Javier Milei became a global celebrity thanks to his unorthodox successful presidential election campaign and the drastic social and economic reforms he implemented immediately after taking office. An economist by education, an admirer of the Austrian School of Economics, who taught at Argentine universities and then worked as a chief economist in pension and financial institutions, he began to draw attention to himself in public debates from 2010, then in parliamentary politics after 2020,” said Jiří Schwarz, founder Liberal Institute and currently rector of the Anglo-American University in Prague.
The Liberal Institute awards its annual prize every year “for the contribution to the development of liberal thought and the implementation of the ideas of freedom, private property, competition and the rule of law in practice” to some of the world’s most important figures of classical liberalism.
In the past, awards in Prague have been received by Nobel Prize laureates for economics Milton Friedman, Gary Becker and James Buchanan, former New Zealand finance minister Roger Douglas, who pushed through extensive economic reforms in the country in the 1980s, author of the privatization of the Chilean pension system José Piñera, former Estonian prime minister Mart Laar or Slovak ex-minister of finance Ivan Mikloš, who was responsible for bringing the country into the eurozone.
