The Argentine president, the far-right Javier Milei, preliminarily scored his first major legislative victory last week by getting the Chamber of Deputies to approve his desired “omnibus” law. Once it is ratified by the Senate – the process begins tomorrow and, as happened in the lower house, it will not be easy either – the president will be able to begin to apply his promised ultra-liberal policies of economic deregulation and his plan to reduce the State. to the minimum expression.
Milei would not have achieved this victory without the participation of her main advisor, who is none other than her sister Karina, who holds the position of general secretary of the Presidency but who is much more than that: above all, she is the one who emotionally supports a president whose mental stability is questioned.
Karina Milei spent 26 uninterrupted hours in Congress during the session in which between last Tuesday and Wednesday the so-called Bases and Starting Points Law for the Freedom of Argentines was debated and approved. The sister of the anarcho-capitalist economist personally negotiated the favorable vote of the forty deputies who had reservations about the project and whose refusal to support it in a first procedure, in February, meant a failure for Milei, now reversed.
In the Casa Rosada or in the Olivos presidential residence not a fly moves without Karina’s authorization, who not only acts as gatekeeper for all visitors who access her brother’s office or his contacts with the press, but also has the last word in all appointments of the Government or the ultra party, La Libertad Avanza.
Significantly, the president calls his sister “the boss,” in the masculine, a subliminal indicator of what Milei thinks about gender ideology. Without Karina, who in the campaign controlled everything from the candidate’s makeup or clothing to the speeches or the organization of the events, Milei would not have won an election, going in just four years from being a visceral talk show host to governing a country of 46 million. inhabitants that is a member of the G-20 despite having one of the least reliable economies in the world.
The Argentine president insists that the real brain of his anti-caste and anti-state discourse is Karina. “You know that Moses was a great leader, but he was not good at spreading the word. Then, God sent Aaron to spread the word. Well, Kari is Moisés and I am the one who divulges. “I’m just a popularizer,” Milei said during the campaign in a television interview, comparing himself to Moses, in one of the biblical references that the president, who practices Judaism and has expressed his intention to convert to that religion, likes so much.
When making that comparison with his sister, the then candidate burst into tears, moved by remembering everything that Karina has represented in his life, especially during his childhood, when she tried to protect him from psychological abuse and the brutal beatings that his father gave him. . The Argentine journalist Juan Luis González, biographer of the president, reveals in his book El loco (Planeta, 2023) many details of the relationship between the two and explains that Karina once ended up in the hospital due to a nervous breakdown after seeing how her father hit her. his brother, then 11 years old. From the hospital, her mother called Javier and told him: “Your sister is like this because of you, if she dies it is your fault,” according to González.
“She is the most wonderful being that exists in the universe,” Milei said of her sister in another interview. “His moral values ??are impeccable,” she added about Karina, who managed to get Javier to reconcile with his parents when, now an adult and independent, he spent eight years without speaking to them.
But González agrees that the most important moment in the relationship between the brothers occurred when Conan died, the English mastiff that he cloned at least four times before his death in 2017 and that for the president was – or is, because he talks about him in present tense– like his son. “She studied to become a medium and began to be the one who communicated with the recently deceased dog with its owner, an activity that today is central in the life of the youngest of the Milei, who claims to be able to speak with living and dead animals. and based on that she makes important decisions,” González writes about Karina’s spiritualist activity.
At 52 years old – one younger than her brother – Karina Milei made a living making cakes that she sold online, after studying public relations and working in unrelevant positions in several companies and before making the leap into politics with Javier. She does not grant interviews and avoids journalists in the corridors of the Casa Rosada. Her only public statements belong to a campaign documentary where she made it clear that she shared her brother’s anti-establishment ideology. “The truth is that politics is rubbish,” she said.
