Six months of Javier Milei

Abstract

It has been 8 months since the inauguration of the Javier Milei administration. His rise to power marks an unprecedented event in Argentine politics. Until 2021, when he stepped into politics and ran for a deputy seat in the city of Buenos Aires, Milei, who besides his role as an economic advisor at Corporación América—a large business conglomerate—had been a frequent guest on television shows, levying strong criticism toward both Kirchnerism and Mauricio Macri's economic policies, advocating for a sharp reduction in the state apparatus and sweeping market reform aggressiveness displayed toward his critics and rivals. In 2021, he founded La Libertad Avanza, a small party that competed in that year's mid‐term election, obtaining 17% of the vote in the city of Buenos Aires and gaining two Chamber of Deputies seats. While not uncommon in other countries, Javier Milei is the first case in Argentina of a presidential candidacy crafted on a television set and social media. His constant presence on shows made him popular across the country against the backdrop of the severe economic decay and deterioration of social indicators that Argentina has experienced over the past 14 years. To many observers, his unexpected victory in the November 19 presidential runoff was a major blow to Argentine politics and the country's establishment. His first‐place showing in the August 13 presidential primaries had already dealt a shock to Argentina's political elites. There was some expectation before the August open, simultaneous, and compulsory primaries (PASO in Spanish) that Milei could end up being the candidate with the most votes at the individual level, but it was believed that the aggregate vote of the main opposition coalition Juntos por el Cambio and of the ruling Frente de Todos, both of which had competitive primaries, would surpass La Libertad Avanza's candidate. The election of outsiders has been a common phenomenon in Latin America since the beginning of the third wave of democratization, but until last year's election, Argentina had not experienced it. The resilience of Peronism and the strength of its partisan apparatus apparently posed a strong barrier for an outsider lacking a strong partisan structure. Furthermore, Argentina's electoral system stood as an obstacle to the rise of outsiders. The PASO, which have effectively turned the presidential election into a three‐round system, and the use of paper ballots, which requires a large apparatus to monitor the electoral process, allegedly provided Argentine politics with a bullet‐proof jacket that safeguarded its polity from outsiders...