It has been a year since a hurricane called Javier Milei devastated the presidential elections in Argentina, humiliating a Peronism that seemed unbeatable in the country. He personified the sound and fury of a country decimated by hyperinflation and anesthetized by subsidies and social plans. “It is the worst inheritance received since the return of democracy,” Milei would say in his inauguration speech on December 10. That’s why he arrived announcing to the thunder the storm that he brought with him: an “electroshock” to reactivate the economy.
In its first year, it managed to lower inflation in record time based on a brutal fiscal adjustment and a maximum cut in public spending. It has reduced the State to its minimum, closed dozens of ministries and departments and fired thousands of officials. The “chainsaw” already has its personal mark. What we are experiencing today in Argentina is a polarized society between those who accuse him of just sinking the country and those who consider him a savior.
It can be said that twelve months after the beginning of the “Milei era” there are visible results, mainly economic, pending accounts that governors, retirees and university students know very well; to whom he tithed their income. To begin with, Milei celebrates this first year in power fought with her vice president Victoria Villaroel, her ally and only partner in the Chamber of Deputies, when, according to her own confession, no one gave “a penny for them.” Along the way he has declared war on almost all the representative figures of Argentine politics and society, merging them into the same bag as “the old political caste.” He has launched diatribes against deputies and senators, regional governors, university rectors, union leaders and now he has attacked journalists, whom he has called “extortionists” and “envelopes.”
On the external level, it has created its own international agenda; He has fought with half of the region’s presidents, including Lula Da Silva of Brazil and Gustavo Petro of Colombia; He has fired his successful foreign minister for voting at the UN against the veto against Cuba; He has shaken hands with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, the “communist” leader of China with whom he swore during the campaign to break relations. In addition to showing off on the balcony of the Casa Rosada with Emmanuel Macron, and enjoying dinner with the Italian Giorgia Meloni. Milei has undoubtedly moderated his shock ideology to embrace pragmatism at the G-20 summit.
«The most successful thing about Milei in its first year of Government is having lowered inflation and country risk, achieving financial stability based on a process of brutal economic adjustment that a large part of the population suffers, since there is a significant increase in poverty,” political analyst Hugo Haime tells LA RAZÓN. “From now on, the Government has the challenge of achieving economic growth and improving the quality of life of Argentines.”
For Bibiana, a single mother of four children and a 17-year-old teenager, who has just given birth to a granddaughter, “things have increased a lot, there are days when you can’t eat, there are people who don’t have work.” Everything is expensive, there is no medicine and on top of that they have closed the dining rooms, where my children could go to eat something. They survive in the poor neighborhood of El Porvenir in Neuquén, a province in southern Argentina, on less than $200 a month. And although he has seen that the deposits for the so-called “child allowances” that the Kirchnerist granted have increased during the Milei Government, it is becoming less and less enough given the rise in prices. Bibiana is one of the victims of the brutal adjustment that Milei undertook to achieve a fiscal surplus.
Argentine analysts agree that now the challenge that awaits them in the coming years is to improve the lives of Argentines. Poverty already reaches 53% of the population and destitution has also deepened.
“The Government has consolidated itself in two areas, in its economic management and in its political strategy”Marcos Novaro, sociologist and author of “History of Contemporary Argentina,” summarizes this newspaper. “Governing alone with a minority government with specific alliances to approve some bills and defend vetoes and decrees has been a successful formula.” “In several aspects it is successful and in economic terms it has achieved that its program, which was quite questioned at the beginning, has more consensus among economists,” he explains.