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. Yet, against all odds, Javier Milei surprisingly ended up as the candidate with the most votes in the August PASO, at 31%, dealing the first blow to Argentina's partisan establishment; he obtained 29% support in the October first round, placing him in second place behind Sergio Massa, whom he defeated in the November 19 runoff by a much larger margin than expected (Labaqui, 2023a). Elected with an 11-point advantage in the presidential second round, Milei's party only held 10% and 15% of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies seats, effectively becoming Argentina's weakest head of state in legislative terms since the democratic restoration in 1983. As is well known, Milei's initial economic package resulted in an acceleration of Argentina's already high inflation rate, presumably leading to a further deterioration of poverty rates and deepening the pre-existing decline in economic activity. Yet, after 6 months in office, Milei's approval ratings remained surprisingly high, according to various public opinion polls raising questions about social tolerance to fiscal austerity and economic adjustment. In this sense, Milei's rise in Argentine politics poses a fascinating set of questions that are relevant both from an empirical and theoretical standpoint. As stated, the rise of populist outsiders (and as I shall describe later, this label fits Milei's leadership strategy and style perfectly) has not been unusual in Latin America but is rather uncommon in Argentina.1 By this token, it is worth questioning what lies behind his stunning ascent to power. The emergence of populist leaders has typically been associated with the deinstitutionalization of party systems (Levitsky & Loxton, 2013; Mainwaring, 2018; Mainwaring & Scully, 1995). The press usually compares Milei's triumph to Donald Trump's 2016 victory in the United States and Jair Bolsonaro's in Brazil. There is more recent literature on the surge of a new illiberal and populist right both globally and in the region (Luna & Rovira-Kaltwasser, 2021; Monestier & Vommaro, 2021). Theoretical discussions about populism are also relevant to understanding Milei. The blend of populism and economic liberalism is hardly a new phenomenon in the region (Weyland, 1996). Milei's legislative weakness also brings back discussions about the elective affinities between neoliberalism and populism raised by Weyland (1996) and Roberts (1995) 30 years ago during the heyday of market reforms in Latin America. At the same time, Milei's quest for radical economic liberalization brings to the forefront debates regarding the political economy of stabilization plans and structural reforms and discussions about the functioning of minority governments under presidential regimes. Milei's presidency has also raised discussions about the consequences his arrival to power could have for Argentina's democracy. Levitsky and Loxton (2013) have argued that the election of a populist leader, especially in the case of outsiders, has usually resulted in the emergence of competitive authoritarian regimes. During the campaign for the 2023 runoff election, several organizations and intellectuals warned about the peril that Milei represented for the fate of Argentina's democracy (Clarín, 2023a). In this essay, I will address some of these questions. First, I will argue that Javier Milei's victory fits well with the existing knowledge about the circumstances that result in the election of populist leaders. Then, I will center on Milei's particular blend of populism, which, as noted, has not been an uncommon phenomenon in the region. In the fourth section, I assess the prospects for governability of Milei's administration. In the final section, I assess the first semester of Milei's tenure as president and discuss whether he poses a threat to Argentina's democracy. The August 13 primaries were a shock for Argentina's political establishment. After votes were counted, Milei surprisingly not only had the most votes as an individual candidate but also his newly formed political party La Libertad Avanza was in first place, outnumbering the until-then predominant political coalitions—the ruling Peronist Unión Por la Patria and the center-right non-Peronist opposition Juntos por el Cambio. Although Argentina's party system had exhibited clear trends of deinstitutionalization since the mid-1990s (Gervasoni, 2018), it had not suffered a collapse of its party system like Venezuela and Bolivia in 1998 and 2005, respectively, or more recently in México with López Obrador's (AMLO) election in 2018, and in El Salvador in 2019. Even during the 2001–2002 economic crisis, despite the profound disenchantment with the partisan establishment, the party system did not break down completely but underwent a partial restructuring (Malamud & De Luca, 2015). The collapse of the convertibility regime certainly took a toll on the degree of institutionalization, but there was a more profound effect on the radical party than on Peronism (Escolar et al., 2002; Torre, 2003). The creation of Cambiemos in 2015—an alliance between Macri's Propuesta Republicana (PRO), the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR). and the Coalición Cívica—resulted in the first victory at the national level of a non-Peronist coalition since the demise of the Alianza—the coalition of the radical party and the center-left Frepaso—in 2001. Both the victory of Cambiemos (later rebranded as Juntos por el Cambio) in 2015 and the Peronist comeback (under the Frente de Todos label, which brought together different Peronist factions that had quit the party during the Kirchner era) in 2019 suggested that Argentine politics were evolving toward a two-coalition system. Paradoxically, the degree of institutionalization in partisan representation exhibited a sharp contrast with the disappointing performance of Argentina's ruling coalitions. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated Argentina's economic problems. The Fernández administration's (2019–2023) decision to tie its fate to rigid enforcement of social distancing measures, coupled with the further economic deterioration brought about by the pandemic, provided the political space for the type of discourse Milei had been putting forth since his emergence in the public sphere, initially as an economic analyst who frequently participated on television shows. Bearing in mind Argentina's declining economic performance in the decade following the commodities boom of the 2000s, the question is not so much how Milei managed to defeat Argentina's partisan establishment but why it took so long to happen. A victory of Sergio Massa, who had been responsible for the Fernandez administration's economic policy since August 2022, would have been abnormal for a variety of reasons. From 2018 to 2023, the only ruling party that managed to win a presidential election in a democratic setting in Latin America was the Colorado Party in Paraguay. The poor economic performance of the Fernández administration, which saw a further acceleration of inflation particularly during Massa's tenure in the Ministry of Economy, made Argentina an unlikely candidate to break the regional anti-incumbent wave. See Table 1. Certainly, Massa was close to striking a first-round victory thanks to Argentina's presidential election rules that require 40% support and a 10-point advantage to avoid a second round. Since Massa had failed to avoid a runoff election, the likelihood of his victory was certainly low. In the first place, Massa failed to achieve a decisive lead in the first round. Reversal of the first-round result has occurred in 35% of elections decided through a second round in Latin America since the beginning of the third wave of democratization. Still, the phenomenon has become more frequent in recent years—12 of the 22 cases of runoff reversal have occurred within the last decade. See Table 2. Second, the poor economic performance of the Fernández administration and particularly of Massa as minister of economy made his triumph a highly unlikely event. Except for the case of Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil in 1994, no presidential candidate from a ruling party or coalition has won an election in Latin America since the beginning of the third wave of democratization when there has been an annual inflation rate above 40% (Labaqui, 2023a). See Table 3. Mainwaring (2018) has argued that poor government performance makes political parties vulnerable to profound electoral losses, effectively undermining the stability of the party system. The case of Argentina's 2023 election fits well with Mainwaring's argument. Not only did Peronism have its worst electoral showing in a presidential election since its emergence in Argentine politics in the 1940s, but also what until then had been the main opposition coalition, Juntos por el Cambio, underwent a dramatic electoral decline that left it out of the November 19 s round. Three consecutive administrations disappointed citizens’ expectations, handing power to their successor in worse conditions than those they had received, creating the space for the surge of a populist outsider. Milei's emergence in Argentina's political landscape fits well with the literature on weak party-system institutionalization and with the more recent discussions on the emergence of a new type of political right in Latin America. Monestier and Vommaro (2021) have pointed out the recent cases of right-wing movements that won elections without previously building a political vehicle. According to them, this new right is based on personalistic leaders embracing a reactionary cultural and political anti-elitist discourse. This new far-right comes in hand with a new wave of populism, an old theme in Latin American politics. Milei would not see himself as a populist leader. In fact, he has frequently blamed populism as one of the causes behind Argentina's stagnation and decay (YouTube, 2022). Yet, his political strategy and style as well as his discourse are typical examples of populist leadership. Populism is a disputed concept. There are disagreements among scholars about its defining elements. The fact that populism is not only an analytical category but also a term frequently used in political discourse, usually with a negative connotation, adds to the controversy. Milei's adherence to economic liberalism and fiscal orthodoxy would not be an example of populism if we use Dornbusch and Edwards’ (1991) definition, which confines the term to a type of economic policy, but the economic definition of populism is problematic for a variety of reasons. For one, many populist leaders have not hesitated on certain occasions to adopt fiscal austerity policies at odds with the economic definition of populism. Despite their differences, I it more to use and Weyland populism as a strategy through which a personalistic or government power based on support from large of According to is a of building political power based on the of through the use of and Milei is a highly personalistic with a with his The fact that he obtained support in his had had a performance in held on a different than the August primaries and the October first round the personalistic and of his leadership. 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