‘I eat the elite for breakfast!’ Argentina’s Javier Milei wants radical disruption.
Javier Milei, Argentina’s libertarian president who came into office last December promising “to take a chain saw to the state,” is giving his audience of elites the show they came to see.
He’s speaking to a gathering of the business organization Council of the Americas in a hotel ballroom with gold leaf and chandeliers. The shaggy-haired economist – a former social media influencer and foulmouthed TV commentator known as “El Loco,” or “The Madman” – is once again trumpeting the themes that brought him to the presidency.
“Argentina in this century has had the worst political administrations in the world – if this were not true, I would not have won,” Mr. Milei says with a devilish grin. The audience, the upper crust of Argentine industry and commerce, laughs and applauds.
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Libertarian President Javier Milei is trying to radically remake Argentina’s economy. Will people accept the pain and give him time to do it?
The president reminds them that he “thinks big” when it comes to changing Argentina’s long-standing policies. The only area in which he doesn’t think big, however, is the size of the government. He calls himself a “minarchist” – a libertarian term meaning someone who believes the state’s only vital function is to provide the security that citizens need to exercise personal freedom.
Since coming into office, Mr. Milei has eliminated nine of 18 ministries. He’s cut back the extensive subsidies on everything from electric bills and gasoline to health care – services that an estimated 60% of Argentines receive. His goal is to fundamentally deregulate an economy that international economists consider to be one of the most regulation-burdened in the world.
Governing under the slogan “No hay plata!” – “There is no money!” – Mr. Milei has delivered the first government surpluses in decades. He’s also reduced his country’s recent hyperinflation – arguably the single most important factor in his landslide victory last October – from over 200% annually to about 4% a month.
Not only has he undertaken the biggest economic adjustment Argentina has ever known, he claims, but it is “actually the biggest in the whole history of humanity.”
Indeed, Mr. Milei has made it clear since moving into the Casa Rosada – Argentina’s deep-pink version of the White House – that his ambition is vaunting: After he delivers Argentina from the clutches of “socialist” statism and “woke” progressivism, he wants his country to be an example not just for a Latin America prone to leftward swings, but for the rest of the world as well.
“Milei believes he’s something like a trigger for a new wave of right-wing leadership across the Americas,” says Ariel González Levaggi, director of the Center for International Studies at Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. “Actually, he envisions himself as more than that: He believes he’s the most important right-wing and pro-freedom leader of this moment who’s going to save the West.”
Barely had the bachelor Mr. Milei settled his four beloved mastiffs into their new presidential home when he flew out to Davos, Switzerland, last January to goad the world’s powerful with his anti-elites message. As president of Argentina, he has also attended the American Conservative Union’s CPAC meetings in the United States and Brazil. He has lashed out against “socialist” Latin American and Western leaders, from Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to Britain’s Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
His oft-repeated pledge to “make Argentina great again” is widely seen as a sign of admiration for Donald Trump. Yet he presents himself first and foremost as a devotee of America’s global leadership – in sharp contrast with the past decade of mostly leftist Argentine leadership that often seemed smitten with Beijing and Moscow.
At his Council of the Americas appearance, President Milei pouts playfully that his global stardom is not adequately appreciated in his home country.
“It’s interesting, the whole world sees the Argentine miracle – except for Argentines,” he says, peering for effect over his dark-rimmed glasses.
Despite his bravado and flare for rocking an audience, Mr. Milei, a former lead singer for a Rolling Stones cover band, seems to understand he’s on an unforgiving political clock. He acknowledges that “The people can’t wait forever” for economic relief from the pain of his radical budget cuts.
Indeed, as he pursues his relentless transformation of Argentina, Mr. Milei and others question how long its people, who have seen less money in their pockets since his policy adjustments, can hold on for an economic turnaround.
Would-be reformist presidents of the past have long tried, and failed, to extricate Argentina from decades of economic boom and bust cycles. But perhaps most daunting for Mr. Milei is the prospect of transforming Argentina’s ingrained leftist populism. Will the people accept such a radical transformation – from a society in which the state provided a social safety net and employed thousands to one in which individuals, unshackled from the state, pull themselves up with their own bootstraps?
For many Argentines on the left, Mr. Milei is seen as a blip in their country’s history, a man with crazy ideas and reforms that will ultimately fail. They point to the example of Brazil, where right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro was voted out in 2022 after one term in favor of the progressive former President Mr. Lula.
But others say this time could be different. With less than a year in office, “Milei has surprised many doubters by accomplishing a list of significant changes, starting with reaching and sticking to a zero deficit,” says Juan Luis Bour, chief economist at Fundación de Investigaciones Económicas Latinoamericanas, a nonpartisan think tank in Buenos Aires.
“What Milei has started is a process that could lead to the regime change he has in his sights, but it’s a process that will require years of turbulence and hardship before it can succeed,” Mr. Bour says, noting that this year the economy will likely shrink by 4%. “The key will be how long people can hold on before they decide this regime change isn’t for them after all.”
Martín Krause, a libertarian economist who taught alongside Mr. Milei at the University of Buenos Aires, cites two reasons he believes this time Argentina’s radical economic shift might last.
“For one thing, Milei didn’t spring his intentions on Argentines after he won. He campaigned on them, carrying around that chain saw wherever he met voters,” says Dr. Krause. “That tells me he has a mandate.”
He also points out that polls show Mr. Milei retaining about the same level of support that gave him the presidency – even after months of economic hardship stemming from his “zero deficit” mantra.
“Argentines aren’t libertarians,” says Dr. Krause. “But they seem to be willing to continue with Milei’s version of it if it means ending the assistance politics of the past decade and chopping down an overgrown state.”
Mr. Milei’s ideas are starting to confront a vigorous pushback, however. With only 15% of seats in Congress held by his Libertad Avanza coalition, Mr. Milei saw his zero-deficit budget proposal roundly rejected when he presented it personally to Congress in September. His vision for Argentina would also be a stark cultural shift away from the state-supported populism that began about 80 years ago under the government of Juan and Eva Perón.
But the Argentine people were desperate to banish the nightmare of hyperinflation, so even modest economic improvement could make Mr. Milei more than a one-term president, some say.
“The answer is simple,” says Dr. González. “If Milei can deliver a stable economy and growth in a way that doesn’t lead at the outset to too much decline in the living standards of the popular classes, he will win. His libertarian ideology and visions of a cultural revolution are a different matter,” he says. “But if he’s successful in his economic management, we’ll have Milei for a long time.”
Like Trump’s, President Milei’s aggressive style draws young men
Liam Toman is beaming as he offers a peek at a video on his phone. It’s as if he were sharing a glimpse of a pearl of great price.
In the clip, which was recorded by Mr. Toman’s mother on a Buenos Aires street in 2018, a man recognizable as Javier Milei says “Hello” to the young man. The future president of Argentina had just been told Mr. Toman is a great admirer of his.
The social media personality and self-described “anarcho-capitalist” then shouts his signature slogan into the camera: “Long live freedom, damn it!”
As it turns out, the slogan captured the mood of young men like Mr. Toman across the country. Young people, and in particular young men not normally prone to political activism, remain an enthusiastic part of Mr. Milei’s base of support.
“I think it’s the rebel in Milei that attracted so many young male Argentines in the first place,” says Mr. Toman, now a 20-something freelance sound engineer. “And then it was his ideas about the need to free Argentina from the status quo of a suffocating state and a stagnant economy that made them his political base.”
Seated in a busy coffee shop in the capital’s upscale Belgrano neighborhood, he underscores what intrigued him most about Mr. Milei when he first saw the outspoken economist on the panel of a TV show called “Los Intratables,” or “The Misfits,” in 2017.
“I was only 16, but he talked about things that made sense to me, like how the political class was only interested in having us pay for their privileges, or how the only way for ambitious young people to get ahead was to leave the country,” he says. “Hearing someone who said what I was thinking gave me hope.”
It also didn’t hurt that Mr. Milei was a growing social media presence at the time, extending his iconoclastic ideas on a medium frequented by young men but that largely remained unknown to their parents.
“The young people are always rebels, but up to this point, being a rebel generally meant being a leftist,” says Dr. Krause, who teaches at the University of the Center for Macroeconomic Studies. “What’s new now is that to be a rebel is to be a libertarian.”
Mr. Toman pinpoints Mr. Milei’s war on la casta, or what he calls the “self-serving political caste.” He also emphasizes the president’s unflagging determination to drastically downsize the state as a primary reason he and most of his friends support Mr. Milei.
Many young Argentine women remain skeptical of Milei
An Argentine soccer fanatic, Mr. Toman dismisses the idea that young men are flocking to Mr. Milei because he rails against the social dangers he believes feminism poses, or that they are reacting to the prominent role young women played in legalizing abortion in Argentina in 2020.
“Don’t forget that Milei calls his sister ‘the boss,’” he says, referring to Karina Milei, for whom Mr. Milei abolished an anti-nepotism policy in order to make her his chief of staff. The current vice president and security minister are also “both strong women,” Mr. Toman says. While younger women may have been reluctant to support such a brash anti-feminist at first, “They now see he’s not a misogynist, and they are turning more supportive all the time.”
Some recent polls suggest that is true, but many young Argentine women remain skeptical at best of what a Milei presidency means for the future.
“Before [Mr. Milei’s] election, there was a real fear that all of our gains won through the feminist movement were going to be lost, and now that he’s president, we are seeing evidence of that regression,” says Marcela de la Cruz, a senior studying international relations at the National University of San Martín, in a working-class suburb of Buenos Aires.
She cites Mr. Milei’s abolition of the only recently created Ministry of Women as just one example of how the new president is setting women back. “Milei is all about turning back to traditional ways, she says.”
Beyond issues of women’s rights, Ms. de la Cruz says the Milei presidency promises a hardening of society that will affect all Argentines, not just women.
“Solidarity is a feminine quality, but it’s not something that is valued by this government,” she says. “Instead Milei is all about individualism and governing with a firm hand. Those are more masculine qualities,” she adds, “so maybe that’s why so many young men were attracted to him.”
Young men are also attracted to Mr. Milei as much for his style as for his message, says Marcelo Duclos, a libertarian economics writer in Buenos Aires.
And while Mr. Milei’s social media presence was critical to his emergence as a political leader, Mr. Duclos says it was television and radio that first gave the president a platform to share his ideas.
“It was the traditional media that let the Milei genie out of the bottle,” says Mr. Duclos, also an amateur bass guitarist. “And then his ratings were so high that it became impossible to put him back in that bottle.”
The economics writer got to know Mr. Milei within Argentina’s few scattered circles of libertarian thinkers about a decade ago. He still has the president’s WhatsApp number in his phone.
This past May, before Mr. Milei launched his new book at the venue Luna Park, Buenos Aires’ version of Madison Square Garden, Mr. Duclos reached out to his fellow libertarian.
“My first thought was, ‘No no no, a conventional book launch is too boring for either Milei or Luna Park,’” he recalls. “So I WhatsApped Javier and I said, ‘Hey, how about we open this book event with a rock concert?’”
The president responded, “Great idea! Let’s do it!”
Days later, the Argentine head of state let loose on Luna Park’s stage. Dressed in a black leather jacket, prancing back and forth like a muttonchopped Mick Jagger, Mr. Milei whipped 10,000 cheering fans into a frenzy, belting out his own version of the song “Panic Show” by the Argentine hard rock group La Renga. It’s become the president’s signature song.
“I’m the king, I’m the lion … I eat the elite for breakfast!” he roared to a rapturous audience, raising his arms and headbanging to a screaming guitar solo.
After this rocking opening, Mr. Milei changed his clothes, donning a suit jacket before presenting his new book, “Capitalism, Socialism, and the Neoclassical Trap,” to his audience – mostly men under age 30.
Argentine farmers: How long before Milei’s economy gets better?
Two cousins, Maximiliano Folco and Juan Ignacio Folco, are chattering about Mr. Milei as they give a seed-sowing tractor a tuneup. The planting season is approaching.
They work for the Manapa agricultural services company not far from Pehuajó, a city of about 40,000 inhabitants in the Argentine Pampas.
“I would say that Milei didn’t win the election; the politicians of the last 20 years lost it,” says Maximiliano Folco as he inspects the seeding funnels that will soon sow soybeans, sorghum, and sunflowers in some of the richest soils on the planet.
“Once it came down to either more of the disaster we were living through, or the change promised by this crazy Milei guy, people gambled and made their choice.”
Juan Ignacio Folco furrows his brow, indicating he sees things a little differently.
“I would say all of Milei’s talk about freedom made a difference for a lot of people,” says the taller and lankier cousin. “The idea of freedom from the heavy taxes that were killing us was attractive generally,” the tractor mechanic says. “But for us farmers, Milei’s talk of free trade made sense. I know I prefer that we open up and work with the world in freedom.”
The cousins’ words are tinged with a bitter and widespread sentiment: Argentina’s political class has been wasteful and corrupt. Many believe it’s impoverished their country and prevented it from advancing on a par with more prosperous neighbors like Uruguay and Chile.
“How is it possible that a country of such wealth can’t even build a decent highway to get our products to the market?” says Maximiliano Folco, referring to the dangerous, truck-clogged national highway between Pehuajo and Buenos Aires and seaports. It remains a two-lane country road despite decades of promises to expand it.
Agricultural exports, including the Pampas’ renowned grass-fed beef, made Argentina a global breadbasket and one of the world’s wealthiest countries a century ago. But recent Peronist governments, which typically had a more urban political base, imposed stiff export taxes on agricultural products – a failed effort intended to bring down domestic food prices and fill government coffers.
Those policies made farmers furious. In protest, many regularly drove their tractors to the gates of Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires.
Despite the ire of farmers and other rural Argentines, the majority of people of Pehuajó, a farming center about 230 miles east of the capital, still voted for Peronist candidates. Yet Mr. Milei did a lot better than conservative candidates of the past.
Many farmers and business owners in the area say they sense that support for the libertarian economist has gone up over his initial nine months in office. They also say his rising support reflects the influence of young Argentines on their elders.
“My 20-year-old daughter was for Milei early on, and at first I told her, ‘How can you vote for him if you also support women’s rights?’” says Carlos Díaz, who has a 330-hectare family farm along with other parcels of farmland he rents to others. “But it was the young people’s enthusiasm for Milei’s vision of radical change that got him through the [primary] round,” he says. “By the general election, I was on board and telling people I had been for Milei all along.”
Other agricultural workers who support Mr. Milei say they realize his policies will take time.
“Once he got in office he confronted certain realities, like he couldn’t eliminate all the taxes he’d like to in one fell swoop,” says Javier Pinto Kramer, who manages the Pehuajó branch of the Enrique Bayá Casal crop seed and fertilizer company.
“Farmers are optimists; we plant seeds and have great faith that the cycle will deliver abundant crops,” he says. “And we have patience for that cycle to work. Right now the country is in patience mode, but many people are hurting, so I’m not sure how long they can wait.”
Argentina’s public servants: Milei makes us feel like parasites
On a recent Saturday at the National University of San Martín, kids are playing games on the lawn and parents are lining up for snacks at a carnival marking the National Day of Childhood.
This commuter school in Buenos Aires serves mostly working-class families. But the revelries take place a day after the government released data showing two-thirds of Argentine children now live in poverty, and nearly 20% are, in fact, destitute.
Those figures stun – and embarrass – many people here. Argentina has long prided itself on having a larger middle class and stronger safety net system than most of its Latin American neighbors. And most of them blame President Milei.
These child poverty statistics reveal “a very sad and shameful number,” says Pablo Phatouros, an architect from nearby San Andrés who’s enjoying the festival with his wife and two children.
Overall, Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Mr. Milei’s presidency, according to the government’s statistics agency in a September report. This is the highest poverty rate in two decades as 3.4 million Argentines have been pushed into poverty this year.
While he agrees something had to be done to fix the economy, Mr. Phatouros says having children pay the price of the president’s “economic experiment” is not right.
Many of the festival’s attendees are public employees in education and health services. There’s an underlying feeling that the libertarian president views them more as parasites than as public servants.
“This government treats us as if we’re robbing the country and making it poor, but I can’t go along with this idea that those who are educating Argentina’s children and caring for the sick should pay for this difficult economic adjustment,” says Juan Martín de la Cruz, an administrator at the university.
“[Mr. Milei’s] idea is that we must suffer now for economic growth at some point in the future,” Mr. de la Cruz says. “But where is that point? At first he told us the economy would perform like a V, with a quick turnaround. And then it became a U, with a longer downturn before recovery,” he says. “But I’m starting to believe it will be an L – with no real recovery.”
The university here was created 35 years ago on a shuttered industrial site. It boasted such departments as nanotechnology and biotechnology, which were supposed to assist in the rebirth of San Martín.
Today, however, the campus is dotted with abandoned construction sites, attesting to years of economic decline. Large banners on the university’s gates protest Mr. Milei’s draconian cuts to higher education.
Lucía Vincent, a political scientist at the National University of San Martín, says if Argentina voted to take a chance with Mr. Milei, it was more a vote of punishment against the political class that allowed the economic decline of the last two decades than a sign of faith in Mr. Milei’s libertarian economic vision.
“People were desperate for change, and Milei promised that,” she says. “So now people are willing to give him the time he needs to get the economy working again.”
But how much time? “He has brought inflation down and people understand that,” Dr. Vincent says. “But on the other hand, there is no rise in economic activity and no real job creation. It’s a ticking time bomb.”
Amid the screams of joy at the childhood carnival at the university, a minority of voices speak up for the Milei revolution, as painful as it is proving to be.
“The adjustment is hurting all of us; our electricity bills and the cost of public transport to get to our jobs are way up,” says Rocío Arevalo, a part-time housekeeper who’s attending the festivities with her family.
“But it’s true what [Mr. Milei] says, that a lot of people didn’t work and lived off the state,” Ms. Arevalo says. “It’s good to help people,” she says. “But it’s also good that people know now that they have to work.”
Damien, a father of two and owner of a small food-services business in San Martín, confirms he voted for Mr. Milei. But he declines to give his last name, suspecting he’s among the few at the carnival who did.
“The truth is, it’s a change that had to happen,” Damien says, keeping an eye on his two children. “The biggest change is Milei saying, ‘No hay plata!’ and sticking to it, unlike the other governments that spent what we didn’t have.”
Still, he says the lack of money in pockets has made this the hardest year yet for his business – and that does test his faith in the Milei revolution.
He worries that in a similar way, families are losing hope in the promised turnaround. “I’m really not sure how long people will be able to hold on.”
