President Javier Milei cannot seriously be faulted for his misfortune in timing Argentina Week for what was Iran Week for the rest of the world, but he was far more at fault in imagining that the best way to lure overseas investors might be to blast their local counterparts. If Forbes magazine has just confirmed the constantly denigrated Techint’s Paolo Rocca to be the country’s richest man with a fortune estimated at US$7.3 billion, why should the billionaires of the United States trust their luck here? Milei would doubtless argue that he is only trying to dismantle the crony capitalism fostered by Kirchnerism but fails to understand that such discourse risks coming across as Kirchnerite in tone abroad – what works as a state-of-the-nation speech in a Congress packed with libertarian cheerleaders (if indeed it did) cannot be recycled intact for an international audience more sophisticated and more ignorant of local subtleties at the same time.
Attack is often said to be the best form of defence and pointing the finger elsewhere might be a logical enough strategy for somebody with little to say on their own behalf, but that was not the case with Milei. He had plenty to boast about without needing to offend anybody – both his own government’s virtues in stabilising and opening up one of the world’s most volatile and isolated economies and the wealth in commodities of a country over 13,000 kilometres distant from a Strait of Ormuz now closed to the world. Not to mention the almost unique political achievement of being accompanied by 11 provincial governors of various political stripes all endorsing his policies. Instead, Milei delivered some 4,500 words in a vitriolic speech roasting the local business establishment without once mentioning the key word “investment,” thus bemusing the US businessmen dropping into Park Avenue from Wall Street while infuriating some of those Argentines from precisely that business establishment who comprised around two-thirds of his audience.
Milei obviously occupied centre stage but sometimes what happens off-Broadway can be more decisive. A minor scandal is brewing over the inclusion of Cabinet Chief Manuel Adorni’s wife (described widely as “life coach”) in the presidential entourage – both unfair and premature to compare this to the 2020 birthday party of then-first lady Fabiola Yáñex at the height of Covid-19 lockdown yet the contradiction between the austerity preached by Adorni more than most libertarians and this Manhattan jaunt (preceded by a Carnival long weekend in Punta del Este via private jet) is so blatant that it must surely dent credibility. Damage to the government in general and perhaps Adorni in particular at a time when he would seem to have displaced Senator Patricia Bullrich as the City mayoral candidate next year at the behest of presidential chief-of-staff Karina Milei.
If US President Donald Trump could be advised to watch his back with this year’s midterms when lurching into his interventionist ventures in Venezuela and Iran, Milei could be a similar case in point. In some ways the libertarian lion is the reverse of Trump’s predecessor Ronald Reagan, who said: “I never worry about the deficit, it’s big enough to look after itself” – Milei seems indifferent to continuing stagflation in the economy at large as the price of maintaining a fiscal surplus to stabilise the macro-economic indicators. The problem is that while his tax cuts do not go far enough to convince domestic industry that they have a level playing-field against imported competition, they have progressed sufficiently to bring state revenues down to the lowest levels since 2013 in the first two months of the year, as announced during his Manhattan absence, thus jeopardising his much-vaunted fiscal surplus while he fights his “cultural battles.”
If Trump is as low as 38 percent in the opinion polls, Milei is not much better off at just over 40 percent. Patience could be running thin and, given the continuing bankruptcy, we could be seeing in the making a vacuum which Nature supposedly abhors. If Milei came out of nowhere some 30 months ago, there could still be time for somebody who can embrace the consensus around fiscal balance consolidated by this government and build beyond it to address the needs of a silent majority with greater social sensitivity and better political manners – perhaps most of all somebody with a superior understanding that genuine stability requires an institutional bedrock. Something which looks very distant in these turbulent times with every prospect for continuing change – whether for better or worse.
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