Latin America

FINALLY HAD ENOUGH PERONISM?:

Argentina’s Voters Hand Javier Milei a Crucial Victory in Midterm Election (Emma Bubola, Oct. 26, 2025, NY Times)

His party received over 40 percent of the vote, showing that despite pain inflicted by his austerity measures, many Argentines are still willing to back his libertarian experiment.

“Today we passed a turning point,” Mr. Milei told supporters on Sunday night, after coming onstage and singing a campaign song.

“Today begins the building of a great Argentina,” he said.

The victory gives Mr. Milei enough support in Congress to prevent his vetoes from being overridden, putting him in a strong position to further his ambitious agenda.

MSINOREP:

Milei’s Economic Miracle: How Argentina Slashed Inflation to 1.5% (Emmanuel Rincon, July 2, 2025, Daily economy)

Milei’s first step was balancing the budget. Through an aggressive program of public spending cuts, eliminating bureaucracy, and reducing public sector jobs, he erased Argentina’s massive fiscal deficit, paving the way for a historic economic recovery. Under his leadership, Argentina began taming inflation with rare fiscal discipline, not just regionally but globally. The latest data is astonishing: in May 2025, the consumer price index rose by just 1.5 percent, the lowest in five years. Remarkably, Milei achieved this without price controls but by liberalizing the economy, fostering market confidence, and slowing inflation. Annual inflation dropped from 211.4 percent in 2023 to 43.5 percent by mid-2025. Wholesale prices even fell by 0.3 percent in May, the best figure in 17 years. Poverty also declined sharply, from 52.9 percent in the first half of 2024 to 38.1 percent in the second, with UNICEF noting that 1.7 million children were lifted out of poverty since Milei took office.

These achievements were no fluke. They stemmed from a clear strategy: fiscal balance, reduced public spending, ending monetary expansion as a financing tool, and economic deregulation. The result? Greater stability, increased demand for the peso, falling inflation, and a rebound in employment and purchasing power.

That was easy enough.

BE MORE LIBERTARIAN:

From Anti-Communist Crusader to Authoritarian Copycat (John Mac Ghlionn, Jan 27, 2025, Discourse)

Only the most deluded of individuals could deny that the 54-year-old inherited an economy on the edge of ruin. In his first year, he implemented austerity measures and slashed government spending, cutting through Argentina’s bloated bureaucracy. His dollarization plan, while controversial, brought a semblance of stability to a currency afflicted with hyperinflation.

These are no small feats. His economic turnaround has earned him the respect of millions, both in Argentina and abroad. In a country where decades of corruption, reckless spending and mismanagement had left its people battered by runaway inflation and crippling debt, disillusionment ran deep. Successive leaders promised change but delivered little, as the gap between the rich and poor widened and basic essentials became luxuries for many. The economy was like the Titanic, already taking on water, and Milei stepped in just before it struck the iceberg. His bold, unorthodox approach seemed to offer a lifeline to a nation desperate for something—anything—different.

To stop the analysis there, however, would be intellectually dishonest. His success in economic reform does not absolve him of his deeply troubling authoritarian tendencies. […]

Just as Xi’s Great Firewall stifles dissent and controls information flow, Milei’s administration has rolled out measures designed to choke transparency and limit public access to critical information, with Decree 780/2024 standing out as a particularly egregious example. This decree grants the government sweeping oversight over media content under the guise of protecting public order and national security. It empowers authorities to monitor and penalize journalists for reporting that is deemed “subversive,” an ambiguously defined term that leaves ample room for subjective interpretation. Under the decree, headlines critical of the administration can be flagged as destabilizing or harmful, leading to fines, forced retractions or even criminal charges against journalists and media outlets.

ONE CUCKOO FLEW OVER:

Argentina Is Responding to Shock Therapy: He comes across like a madman, but Javier Milei is fast becoming the man of the moment. (Quico Toro, Dec 17, 2024, Persuasion)

Alongside a tax and cost-cutting spree, Javier Milei has gone on a kind of crusade against the thicket of regulatory nonsense that had colonized every bit of the Argentinian state. His economy minister launched a new mechanism to invite Argentinians to suggest useless rules to be done away with: in the first eight hours it was in operation, it received over 1,300 suggestions. The government deregulated everything from imports to labeling to apartment rentals. Its Deregulation Minister thundered at the mass of absurd regulations that meant importing, say, $30,000 dollars worth of toys required you to spend $10,000 on paperwork.

Argentinians may not have all turned into doctrinaire libertarians overnight, but they seem to have been catching on to the utility of the libertarian instinct. Faced with the mad mass of overbearing state interference in economic life, they seem to have accepted that you need a bit of a lunatic to cut through it: someone with the bombast and the pugnaciousness to fight the beast. In normal times, you’d surely prefer your president not to run around waving a chainsaw in the air like a madman, but Argentina left normal times so long ago the objection barely seems to even register.

Not, of course, that you can ever rest quite easy with a crazy person in charge of the government. Though he’s shown some signs of moderation in, for instance, restraining himself from calling Xi Jinping a murderous thug to his face, the way he used to, Javier Milei remains the edgelord he’s been all along: inveterately vituperative, revelling in insult, permanently itching for a fight. Treating bilateral relations with Spain the way a 14-year-old treats his first online fight, he called Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez “the torture poor Spaniards have to put up with.” His frustration-control, never strong, remains as flimsy as ever. As long as he stays in power, Argentina will always be one tweet-thread away from the next crisis.

But for the moment, Milei has had more successes than failures. He’s stabilized the currency, ended the deficit, tamed inflation, and made more progress in terms of structural reform than would’ve seemed imaginable a year ago. He’s managed to get enough support from a congress he doesn’t control to pass some important reforms, though he’s had to push much of his agenda through executive action. He’s pushing for a major new nuclear power plant building program to prepare Argentina for the AI future. Milei is a man with big plans, and it’s no longer obvious they will fail.

WHERE’S THE BEEF?:

Argentina’s reforms are more than economic: For most Argentines, cooperation among political rivals is a reason for patience amid economic reform (The Monitor’s Editorial Board, June 25, 2024, CS Monitor)

Mr. Milei’s biggest challenge may be in keeping a political consensus for his difficult reforms. He has brought key opposition figures into his Cabinet. And in a June 13 vote in the Senate, he won incremental changes that mix spending cuts with measures to strengthen cooperation between national and local officials.

In March, Mr. Milei asked ordinary citizens for their “patience and trust.” The reforms enacted so far have exacerbated hardships. The percentage of people living in poverty has reached the highest it’s been in 20 years (57.4% nationally). Yet two polls this month found that as many as 63% of citizens are willing to stay the course.

Their confidence may rest on a willingness of Argentina’s political leaders to work together with transparency. “It was crucial that he showed that he can work with the opposition to get something approved,” Eugenia Mitchelstein, a political analyst at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires, told The Wall Street Journal. “If everything is a conflict, and no negotiation, he won’t get anything done.”

Mr. Milei received similar advice this week during a brief visit with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. While Argentina makes far-reaching economic reforms, it is important to protect “social cohesion,” Mr. Scholz said. Greece won that key battle. Argentina seems ready to do the same.

THE BUSINESS OF GOVERNMENT IS NOT BUSINESS:

Javier Milei takes a chainsaw to Argentina’s state companies(Ciara Nugent, 3/21/24, Financial Times)

“All of these companies . . . spend 20 per cent of their budgets on delivering their specific goals, and 80 per cent on management costs,” Guillermo Francos, Milei’s interior minister, told Argentine television network LN+ last month. “We must strive for efficiency.”

ASAP, a local NGO tracking government finances, found Milei had cut transfers to state companies to 456bn pesos, or $535mn at the official exchange rate, in February — a 61 per cent decline in inflation-adjusted terms from the same month in 2023.

The roughly 40 state-owned companies provide public services including passenger rail, sewerage and energy. Most operated at a loss under previous governments. Now Milei’s administration has appointed new management at many of them, with a mandate to slash staff numbers and revamp their strategies.

Juan Cruz Díaz, managing director of the Cefeidas political consultancy, said: “There’s a lot of space to cut costs, make things more efficient, improve management [in Argentina’s state companies]. But the government has an ambition to move much more intensely. This is a question of principles as much as costs.”