The Argentine president, the far-right Javier Milei, preliminarily achieved the first major legislative victory last week after getting the Chamber of Deputies to approve the desired omnibus law. Once it is ratified by the Senate – the procedure starts tomorrow and, as it happened in the Lower House, it will not be easy either – the president will be able to start implementing the ultra-liberal political promises of economic deregulation and the plan to reduce the State to the least expression.
Milei would not have achieved this triumph without the participation of her main adviser, 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 supports emotionally a president whose mental stability is questioned.
Karina Milei spent the 26 uninterrupted hours in Congress during the session in which between Tuesday and Wednesday the so-called Law of Bases and Starting Points 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 processing in February, meant a failure for Milei, now reversed
In the Casa Rosada or in the presidential residence of Olivos, not a fly moves without the authorization of Karina, who not only serves as the gatekeeper of all visitors who access her brother’s office or her contacts with the press, but also has the last word in all the appointments of the Government or the ultra party, La Libertad Avanza.
Significantly, the president calls his sister “el jefe,” 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 make-up and clothing to speeches and the organization of events, Milei would not have won an election, going from being a visceral socialite to governing a country of 46 million in just four years of 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 mastermind of his anti-caste and anti-State speech is Karina. “You know that Moses was a great leader, but he was not good at divulging. Then God sent Aaron to him to divulge. Well, Kari is Moses and I’m the one spreading the word. I’m just a publicist,” Milei said during the campaign in a televised interview, comparing himself to Moses, in one of the biblical references that the president likes so much, who practices Judaism and has expressed the intention to convert to this religion
When he made this comparison with his sister, the then-candidate burst into tears, moved to remember all that Karina has represented in his life, especially during his childhood, when she tried to protect him from psychological abuse and 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 once Karina ended up in the hospital due to a nervous breakdown after seeing how his father beat his brother, then 11 years old. From the hospital, the mother phoned Javier and said: “Your sister is like this because of you, if she dies it is your fault”, according to González.
“She is the most wonderful being in the universe,” said Milei of her sister in another interview. “His moral values ??are impeccable,” he added about Karina, who managed to get Javier to reconcile with his parents when, already an adult and independent, he had not spoken to them for eight years.
But González agrees that the most important moment in the relationship between the brothers was when Conan died, the English mastiff that he cloned at least four times before he died in 2017 and that for the president he was – or is, because he talks about it in present – ??as his son. “She studied to become a medium and began to be herself the one who made the recently dead dog communicate with its master, an activity that is now central to the life of the youngest of the Milei, who says that he can talk to living and dead animals and that, based on this, he makes important decisions”, writes González about Karina’s spiritualist activity.
52 years old – one less than her brother -, Karina Milei earned a living by making cakes that she sold on the Internet, after studying Public Relations and working in minor positions in several companies and before taking the step into politics with Xavier He does not grant interviews and avoids reporters in the corridors of the Pink House. His only public statements belong to a campaign documentary in which he made it clear that he shared his brother’s anti-establishment ideology. “The truth is that politics is rubbish”, assured the president’s sister.
