Finally, after two rounds of elections, Javier Milei is the new president of Argentina. After gaining 30% of the votes in the first round, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist” candidate climbed to almost 56% in the runoff, defeating the current minister of economy, Sergio Massa, who improved his previous vote share by just 7%, not enough for a victory.
At the national level, Massa and his long-ruling socialist Peronist party only won three provinces of the geographically large country—the very poor Santiago del Estero and Formosa and the very rich province of Buenos Aires, which has, nevertheless, increasingly large swaths of impoverished suburbs. But notably, in the highly populated Buenos Aires province, Massa still won only by a slight margin with 50.73% of the vote.
The conservative party of former president Mauricio Macri played a key role in the libertarian’s victory. After the poor performance of conservative candidate Patricia Bullrich in the first round of elections, Macri put all his support behind Milei, calling on his constituency to vote for Milei’s party La Libertad Avanza. It appears they heeded the call.
Also decisive was Milei’s ability to transform himself into the vehicle for Argentines to channel their dissatisfaction with some forty years of Peronist-style socialism. An economist by profession and a radical libertarian by philosophy, Milei has been a public figure for almost two decades. From once advocating for selling organs on the open market and even opening up a discussion about selling children, he has toned down on social issues advocating in his campaign for the state’s duty to protect the right to life.
Economically and politically, though, he remained as radical as ever, promising a form of “shock therapy” for Argentina that included whittling down government ministries from 20 to five, privatizing infrastructure from streets to airports, and prohibiting the Argentine central bank from printing money. In light of rampant inflation (143% this year), a government that has financed a large welfare state with printing money, and a currency in freefall, it’s hardly surprising that a candidate making these promises attracted voters’ attention.
His campaign also rallied against the long-standing political class, known as “la casta.” While many Argentines don’t necessarily agree with his policy proposals, they voted for him because “he is new,” and other politicians have failed to deal with soaring inflation and economic stagnation. Whatever lingering concerns about his potential social policy voters may have had, they were mostly concerned about the country’s dire economic situation as both the vote and the campaign’s focus on economic issues reflected.
“I aspire to be first Jewish president in Argentine history”
Among the first to meet with the president-elect were Eyal Sela, the Israeli Ambassador in Buenos Aires, and a delegation from the AMIA Jewish Center, according to The Algemeiner. The representative body of Argentina’s 180,000-person Jewish community, DAIA, also congratulated Milei on his victory. Argentina’s Jewish population is the largest in Latin America, and the third-largest in the Americas, after the United States and Canada.
The president-elect’s support for Israel is well known, and he has promised to move the Argentinian embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and to visit the United States and Israel before his December 10th inauguration. “I am thinking about converting to Judaism and I aspire to become the first Jewish president in Argentine history.”
The La Libertad Avanza leader has repeatedly pledged to shift Argentina’s foreign policy away from the current government’s focus on relations with Brazil and China and to deepen relations with the United States and Israel.
As The Buenos Aires Times and other have noted, a trip to Israel “will be read as backing Israel’s strategy in Gaza at a time other Latin American leaders have questioned it.”
Milei has strongly criticized President Alberto Fernández’s administration for its response to the October 7th terror attack by the Hamas terror group against Israel.
“The position adopted by the Argentine Foreign Ministry is too soft for the aberrant situation that is happening [in Israel],” Milei said at a meeting last month.
A total of 21 Argentines were kidnapped in last month’s assault and they are still being detained.
Milei and his supporters celebrated the paradigm shift his victory represents with a euphoria that spilled into the streets. The deflated Massa camp, meanwhile, acknowledged defeat at 8:00 p.m.
“We did not come to invent anything, but to do the things that history has shown to work,” Milei later said in his own victory speech, recalling as well that “Argentina’s situation is critical.”
“There is no place for gradualism or lukewarmness, there is no place for half measures,” he added. “If we don’t move fast with the structural changes that Argentina needs, we are heading for a worse crisis.”
He pledged his commitment “to democracy, free trade and peace” and to “work side by side with all the free nations of the world.”
“We have a monumental problem ahead, inflation, stagnation, genuine lack of employment, insecurity, poverty and destitution, problems that only have a solution if we embrace the ideas of freedom,” he closed.
