There are almost three weeks until the presidential inauguration in Argentina. But the new political era of a radical right that is both libertarian and authoritarian is already underway.
Taking into account the statements, the plan could be summarized as follows: the State will be quartered, and the entire public sector, despised by the Government of Javier Milei and the elected Vice President, Victoria Villarruel. Only some elements will be saved in the assault on the State and the so-called caste: the police and the military, even those of the dictatorship (1975-83).
Javier Milei reaffirmed, in an interview granted to private Argentine television on Tuesday, the commitment to implement a radical plan to dismantle a large part of the public sector. It will start with the public works, even those that are already in progress. “We don’t have money, so these works can be handed over to the private sector and they finish them,” said the president-elect.
This, of course, assumes that there is enough interest in the private sector to undertake work in a country trying to avoid the danger of hyperinflation and a possible economic depression, which could be the consequence, according to many economists, of the plan to dollarization of Milei, which would transfer responsibility for monetary policy to the Federal Reserve in Washington.
Milei congratulated himself for being the only winner of the presidential election in recent history who has spoken sincerely about the need to implement strong adjustment. Only in this way will it be possible to lower an inflation rate of around 150%, he explained, and solve the solvency crisis of the Argentine economy. “It is the first time in history that someone wins who campaigns saying he will make an adjustment,” said the future president.
Milei failed to recognize what almost all international economists are very clear about: an adjustment based on a cut in public spending equivalent to 15% of GDP in tandem with dollarization will make the working classes – without dollar savings and very vulnerable to the rise in inflation and subsequent recession – in the first victims of the plan. Milei said that “the adjustment will not be paid by the Argentines, it will be paid by the politicians and their partners, that is, the caste”.
The incoming Government team hopes that the reduction in the size of the State will create space for private investment. “We propose a plan of adjustment and reforms to generate economic growth”. But the experience of countries like Brazil during the years of Jair Bolsonaro prove that cuts in public investment tend to discourage private investment.
While Milei is promoting the adjustment plan to the media, the new vice president, Victoria Villarruel, is pushing the other parts of the change agenda, specifically, reversing the memory program for truth and justice and helping the military of the dictatorship to get out of jail This is where the symbolic importance of the meeting planned yesterday in the Senate between Villarruel and Cristina Fernández, the current vice-president and historic Peronist leader, comes from. After the famous trials of military torturers in the eighties, under the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner launched a second wave of trials in the first decade of this century. This generated strong opposition and Villarruel became the spokesperson for a campaign that wanted – and wants – to put an end to the search for those responsible for the atrocities committed and classified as crimes against humanity. Villarruel “will try to cut it and he has public support because many soldiers will die in prison with preventive sentences without having been tried – said analyst Enrique Zuleta, former advisor to Raúl Alfonsín. In Spain, nothing was investigated; everything has been investigated here and there is a majority – 70% in the polls – that wants to put an end to it [the trials]”.
A true believer in the battle against the system, Villarruel can be an obstacle for Milei when agreeing more parliamentary support with the center-right, led by Mauricio Macri and Patricia Bullrich. Villarruel has called Macri “a tepid latte”, and Bullrich, “a member of the caste”. It was said yesterday that Milei had blocked the vice-president-elect’s attempt to be appointed Minister of Defense and Security.
