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Argentina’s nervous breakdown set to deliver far-right candidate to power [1]

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Date: 2024-02 

Arriving at Jorge Newbery International Airport, the closest airport to Buenos Aires, in March, it soon becomes clear anything and everything is justified in the hunt for the dollar.

One taxi driver tries to charge the ‘official exchange rate’, which he puts at 200 pesos; another, making me get into his car, tells me that the black exchange rate – known as the blue dollar – is 300 pesos (the real rate was 400 at the time). At the taxi counter inside the airport, one man says nobody in the city will accept notes of less than $100 dollars. The last driver speaks of a formidable sum of 700 pesos to the dollar but says he has no change. In the end, realising that I am not easy prey, a man who appears to be the boss orders one of his subordinates to take me to my hotel for 20 dollars.

This open war for the dollar is being reproduced across Argentina and has become one of the central battles of the presidential elections. It appears likely to deliver Javier Milei, a far-right eccentric anarcho-capitalist, to power – possibly even in the first-round run-off on Sunday. His election would break the political chessboard, with unforeseeable consequences.

Milei, who defines himself as a libertarian economist, has made the dollarisation of the Argentine economy one of the workhorses of his disruptive electoral campaign. He burst into an Argentinean political arena dominated by the legacies of decades of Peronism and characterised by a statist and inefficient government, an oversized public sector, a subsidised civil society and highly mobilised and powerful trade unions that control important productive sectors.

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Argentina has had macroeconomic problems for decades, sometimes alleviated by a rise in the prices of the commodities it exports to half the world, such as corn, soya, oil and wheat, but always on the verge of bankruptcy. Repeated sovereign debt crises and the impossibility of meeting payments on IMF loans led it to declare traumatic defaults in 2001, 2014 and 2020, forcing debt restructurings and renegotiations with the IMF for the repayment of billion-dollar loans, which it is now also unable to meet.

With deep structural problems and skyrocketing inflation, which remained below 100 points last year but has since jumped to 138% (JP Morgan predicts it will reach 210% by the end of the year), the current ruling class has long since demonstrated its utter inability to govern the economy effectively.

Against this backdrop, the emergence of Milei, an ex-footballer, ex-hard rock singer and TV talk show host, who gives supposedly didactic speeches that include some technicalities to emphasise his specialist profile, has landed like a missile on the waterline of the Argentine political class.

With a narrative inspired by that of other populist leaders of the far right such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and recently José Antonio Katz in Chile, Milei claims that the problem is ‘the caste’ that has run (and ruined) the country for decades, which only an outsider can dislodge.

Milei presents simple and straightforward solutions that are understandable to the electorate. He says he will oust the establishment and put reasonable people who know how to do business into office, who will save this rich country from wreckage and communism.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/-javier-milei-to-win-first-round-argentina-election-president/

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