Javier Milei: Madman? Or Savior?

Argentina elected the first self-identified libertarian president in history. Is he a madman? Or a savior? 

Can his libertarian ideas transform Argentina into a beacon of prosperity? Reason visited Argentina to find out if Javier Milei's reforms are working. 

On the ground in Buenos Aires six months after Milei took office, a massive protest filled the public squares and streets outside the national legislature and presidential palace. Congress was voting on a reform package that would deliver on part of his agenda. 

Nearly one in three Argentinian workers belong to a union, and organized labor holds tremendous political power and the ability to mobilize large protests like the one we witnessed opposing Milei's reform package. Participants say Milei's agenda helps the rich and handicaps the poor. 

"None of what's happening [with the law] serves the interests of the people," says Sylvia Saravia, national coordinator for a left-wing populist political party present at the protest called Free Movement of the South, which opposed Milei. "For example, fiscal reforms that benefit the rich and hurt the poor."

If Milei gets his way, unions will be crippled by the time he leaves office. He wants to privatize sectors like the airline industry, which is dominated by organized labor, and to end the mandatory deduction of union dues. That would mean workers would have to actively choose to hand over part of their salaries to these groups.

"What [Milei] is doing is destroying science, destroying technology, destroying public education," says Saravia.

Protesters waved Marxist hammer-and-sickle flags and pictures of Che Guevara, the communist icon. Che was the ideological brains behind the Cuban revolution—but he was born here in Argentina.

"We stand with Che and everything he fought for," says Daniel Aguirre, a protester with the Argentine Rebel Movement, a Marxist political group. "We must share the wealth. It shouldn't be concentrated in the hands of the few."

Argentina was never communist, but the government has played an outsized role in the economy since the end of World War II. Protestors regularly take to the streets to defend the status quo against Milei's agenda—but that status quo has brought the country to the brink of ruin. 

Argentina faced 25 percent monthly inflation when Milei took office because the government was printing money to pay for things it couldn't afford. As a result, roughly half of the people in this country of nearly 50 million were living in poverty.

Milei blames Argentina's downfall on "la casta," which essentially means the "elite political class."

As the protest grew in front of the legislature and presidential palace, across town a different-looking crowd was gathering to hear Milei speak. At the luxurious Hilton Hotel, it was the final day of a conference cohosted by two libertarian think tanks, Argentina's Fundación Libertad y Progreso and the Washington, D.C.-based Cato Institute. 

"After repeated failures, we've forgotten that economic freedom brings prosperity," Milei told the crowd.

Ian Vásquez, Cato's vice president of international studies, who brought Milei to the stage, says that Argentina was once a "classically liberal country."

"So [Milei] draws on those traditions to make his case and overturn 80 years of statism," says Vásquez. 

Nineteenth-century Argentina was never anything close to a libertarian utopia—it had a large government under the sway of wealthy landowners. But thanks to its 1853 constitution, which was modeled after the U.S. founding document, it became a more or less a laissez faire democracy. 

Tellingly, about 6.6 million European immigrants migrated to Argentina in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, seeking economic opportunity and refuge from war. They coined the phrase "rich as an Argentine."

The economy grew by 7 percent a year before World War I—faster than that of the U.S., Australia, and most of Europe.

Buenos Aires' historic buildings hint at the nation's former grandeur. Now, many are decrepit and in need of updating. Milei wants to reverse the century of decline and restore Argentina to its former glory.

"The history of the last 100 years of our homeland was a warning," Milei told the conference attendees. "It's a small window into what can happen in the free world if you let down your guard and let yourself be seduced by socialism.…Guys, I'm a libertarian. I'm not going to do that kind of crap. I believe in freedom. I don't believe that politicians are gods."

Vásquez describes Milei as having "become an international leader at a time when so many countries are going in the other direction," one whose influence extends far beyond Argentina. Elon Musk beamed in as the warm-up act for Milei. During his first six months in office, Milei, the first Argentine president to become an international celebrity, spent significant time in the U.S. meeting with business leaders. 

Milei, an academic economist, made tackling the monthly double-digit inflation and spiraling deficits left behind by his predecessors the central theme of his speech at the conference.

"We were facing what was going to be the worst crisis in all of Argentine history," says Milei.

Since he took office, Argentina's inflation has dropped to under 4 percent per month, which is still dreadful but also a spectacular improvement. His spending cuts led to the first budget surpluses in more than a decade. And while the economy was shrinking for six months prior to his election, six months into his term, economic activity increased year over year, despite predictions to the contrary. 

Milei eliminated stringent regulations on rental contracts, and the supply of available apartments in Buenos Aires roughly doubled. 

"Nobody expected the turnaround that much," says Vásquez. "We always knew that this policy change, and especially this thoroughgoing libertarian reform agenda in Argentina, was going to be a titanic task. I mean, the Peronists are still in Congress." 

What Milei calls "la casta" has its origins in the post–World War II era, when President Juan Perón built vast patronage networks and gave political interest groups outsized influence over the economy. Perón was inspired by the orderliness imposed on society by the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, whom he once called "the greatest man of our century."

The Eva Perón Foundation, named after the first lady who is still a cultural icon, displaced the Catholic Church as the main provider of Argentina's social safety net, funding its so-called social justice mission largely through state subsidies, union dues, and big business shakedowns.

The song "And the Money Kept Rolling In" from the musical Evita offers a critical take on Peronism. As the money rolled in, it came with a heavy dose of Peronist propaganda: The government—and the loving and generous president and his wife in particular—had come to take care of the needs of their people.

Peronism carried on in Argentina through the generations. President Néstor Kirchner was succeeded by his wife Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and together they held office from 2003 to 2015. They governed with a progressive agenda shrouded in a Peronist personality cult. 

Milei's immediate predecessor, President Alberto Fernández, had served as an adviser to the Kirchners and continued the Kirchnerist policies of high taxation, deficit spending, and heavy regulation. 

The Kirchnerists and Peronists still hold almost half the seats in Argentina's national legislature, where they fought Milei's reform bill, as the protests grew violent outside.

Many Argentinians are under economic duress. Foreign goods became more expensive when Milei cut the formal value of the peso against the dollar. He slashed spending on energy and transit, and laid off 50,000 government workers with plans for 70,000 more. The real value of government pensions has declined significantly, and for most retirees, they're not enough to live on.

Milei has said that welfare recipients are "victims, not perpetrators" who are "on welfare as a consequence of the intrusion of the state in the economy." Accordingly, he pushed through some modest increases in benefits to cushion the impact of his cuts early on. 

Milei's critics questioned his administration's priorities when, last April, it spent $300 million on 24 F-16 fighter jets, although Argentina faces no foreign military threats. His spokesman says they were purchased at a good price and bolster the country's security. 

A major challenge for the disruptive administration has been dealing with protesters who show little respect for public or private property. During the protest against Milei's reform bill, some of them burned a car belonging to a news station that gives favorable coverage to the president. Others threw Molotov cocktails. 

"We are at a crossroads," Milei told the crowd at the Cato event. "Either we persist on the path of decline, or we have the courage to choose liberty. That battle is even going on in the street….Fortunately, we have a great Minister of Security and she is putting the house in order."

Big protests are common in Buenos Aires, occurring at least once a month during the first half of 2024 after Milei assumed the presidency. His minister of security, Patricia Bullrich, has moved to impose limits. Peaceful demonstrations on sidewalks and public squares are permitted—but blocking traffic is not.

"Those who set cars on fire, those who destroy public property. What are they if they are not criminals? Explain it to me," she said at a press conference. 

Vásqeuz calls it a "tricky thing for any democracy" to deal with destructive mobs. 

"They block people's access to the roads to get to their jobs. They plunder businesses. They destroy property. They overturn cars. They do that in order to get a particular political outcome. So obviously you can't just let that happen," says Vásquez.

Milei has proposed that the government use AI to identify faces in the street, and he's threatened to cut off welfare payments to anyone caught blocking the roads. In January, he sent unions and activist groups a $66,000 bill for the cost of additional cops. Shortly after police clashed with protesters outside of the legislature, Bullrich posted a video glamorizing the crackdown.

"We cannot allow a group of misfits, no matter how big or how small, to disobey the law, damage both private and public property, and turn violent against security forces," Milei's spokesman Manuel Adorni told Reason. Like many members of Milei's inner circle and fledgling political party, he is a political outsider, having worked as an economist and opinion journalist before joining Milei's administration. 

Bullrich is also a drug warrior, regularly posting images of narcotics busts to her social media. Adorni says that Milei is "philosophically anarcho-capitalist" and opposes the drug war in principle. But he believes legalization isn't feasible with Argentina's large welfare state intact.

"The President has explained it to me on more than one occasion, we have a state that tries to fix everything," says Adorni. "We can't legalize something if the whole society pays the cost of your addiction. When you have such a large state, first you have to restructure things."

One of Milei's heroes is the Austrian-school economist Murray Rothbard, author of—among other books—For a New Liberty, which explains how a capitalist society would function without any government at all. But as president, Milei has set out to work within the system.

"One has to accept the chasm between the ideal of anarcho-capitalism and the world we're living in," says Adorni. "The state is here to stay, and we have to accept it. And what President Milei understood before entering politics is that if you're going to reform the system, you have to do it from the inside."

Milei's law-and-order approach and disdain for the left have often led the media to compare him to former President Donald Trump. Milei doesn't seem to mind the comparison, hugging the president at the 2024 Conservative Political Action Conference, where Trump gave his famous slogan an Argentinian twist, proclaiming his enthusiasm to "make Argentina great again."

The two share a background in television, a strong sense of showmanship, and a penchant for inflammatory rhetoric. Like Trump's critics in the U.S., Milei's critics view him as dangerous, unstable, and even outright psychotic. Even Milei's supporters call him "El Loco," or the madman, a nickname from his childhood.

His eccentricity generates constant media fodder. There are his chainsaw antics, the cloning of his beloved English mastiff Conan five times, and his close relationship with his tarot card–reading younger sister Karina, a key political adviser he refers to as el jefe, or "the (male) boss."

But the economic crisis was so severe that many voters were willing to take a chance on "El Loco."

"Many people say, well, maybe this guy is a little bit unstable or whatever, but, you know, we tried with all these other [establishment] guys," says Emilio Ocampo, an economist who advised the Milei campaign. "This guy at least seems to have strong convictions. He's not corrupt. He has integrity. Let's try with this guy."

Milei's opposition has seized on his wild antics as a pretext to stop him.

As the protests against Milei's economic reform bill roiled outside, one legislator on the inside attempted to short-circuit the proceedings with a motion to allow Congress to deem Milei mentally unfit to hold office and to remove him as president.

"It's a culture of controlling everything. An addiction to power," says Rep. Damián Arabia, a Milei ally. He says Peronists would rather bring down the government than yield control. "Honestly, some of them want to destabilize the government."

Adorni calls their antics "the modern coup d'etat," meant to wear down the president until he leaves. 

"Media and the opposition, who are losing their power, try to discredit people like me, because we are different," says Lilia Lemoine, a member of Congress and part of Milei's fledgling political party.

Lemoine is another political newbie drawn in by Milei's antiestablishment message. She's also a tabloid favorite because of her brief romantic relationship with Milei and interest in cosplay. 

"I don't come from politics like many in our movement," says Lemoine. "I'm here because I wanted to change my country. Because I want to be a mother. I want to live in my country. I don't want to leave it. So I've been fighting for it."

Her opponents also paint her as a loony conspiracy theorist because she hosted a TV program discussing whether the Earth is flat. She says it was for entertainment purposes and that she doesn't actually believe the Earth is flat. She says she does believe in at least one conspiracy: The conspiracy among academics and politicians to hide the true cause of inflation from the public. 

"[Inflation is a] monetary phenomenon. That's something that libertarians know. But I will dare to say that politicians, even if they know what causes inflation, they cover it up because they need to keep printing money to pay for their political life….We are uncovering that."

Many members of Milei's governing coalition by and large don't share his libertarian views. They were drawn in by the cultural battles he's waged more so than his libertarian economic agenda. Milei dissolved Argentina's Ministry of Women, rolled back quotas for hiring transgender workers in government, and banned schools and government offices from using "gender-inclusive" terms. 

Unlike many libertarians, Milei supports banning abortion. One member of his party promoted a bill to criminalize the practice, a move that likely would've provoked enough backlash to shatter his fragile legislative majority and threaten his entire economic agenda.

"It was the wrong time to do it," says Lemoine of the attempted abortion ban. 

Arabia, who describes himself as "gay, liberal, capitalist, and pro market" in his X profile, says he has no worries about Milei's social agenda, who is on the record supporting the right of gay people to marry in Argentina. Arabia says the libertarian approach to women's or LGBT rights shouldn't be to create special government ministries, but to expand liberty for everyone.

"We don't want the state to meddle in our lives," says Arabia. "Basically, just leave us alone."

Milei's unusual personality provides ammunition for those who say he's crazy—but that unusual personality also helped him get elected. Milei and Trump became famous television personalities before rising to the presidency, but from the standpoint of policy, the differences are huge. 

Trump is a nationalist and a protectionist, while Milei is a committed free trader. Government spending exploded on Trump's watch, although his "government efficiency" appointee Vivek Ramaswamy pledges to follow Milei's lead and slash spending in Trump's second term.

But there's no doubt that Milei shares Trump's flamboyance and social media acumen, and that both are crucial to his political success. 

"Milei himself always said that his campaign was done through social media," says Augusto Grinner, a producer with a popular YouTube channel who helped spread Milei's message through memes and videos during his presidential campaign. 

"Sometimes I hear people saying, 'Argentina is libertarian.' No, Milei didn't win because he's libertarian," says Grinner. "People voted against the status quo. It was because he was so radically antiestablishment."

Argentina's ruling class was so unpopular that Milei eventually won against the country's former economic minister with a larger percentage of the vote than any president since Argentina's return to democracy in 1983. 

But it was fury over the government's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that first vaulted him to social media stardom among Argentina's youth. Buenos Aires had the longest continuous lockdown in the world at 234 days. 

A group of activists who do youth outreach for Milei attended the conference and later sat with me at a café to explain their support for the president.

"I think that Milei's honesty and his attitude and the way he communicates made people say, 'Whoa, I really like this guy,'" says Patricio Adreani Manny.

During Argentina's COVID-19 lockdowns, Milei's predecessor, Alberto Fernández, was caught hosting a dinner party for his wife in the presidential palace.

"That picture was all around Argentina. And people start thinking, 'If I meet up with my friends, I'm a murderer, right? The president does it, like, nothing happens,'" says Santiago Vietes, another one of the youth activists.

Sociologist Pablo Seman, who has written about the rise of the libertarian movement in Argentina, says the pandemic became a "symbol for the lack of freedom" in Argentina—a lack of freedom that hit young people the hardest. 

Argentina's youth came for the fiery lockdown critiques and stayed for the economics lessons. Milei offered an explanation for the inflation and poor economy that many had never heard before. 

"Previous to the quarantine, I think that nobody in Argentina had the courage to call himself a liberal or libertarian. It was like a bad word," says Vietes. "Then Milei came and he started to talk about libertarianism, about the Austrian school of economics, about free markets." 

Vietes says living through Argentina's inflation accelerated his adoption of libertarianism because you don't know what the price of food and other essential goods will be day to day. Another activist we spoke to called it "a crime" that politicians can print money as they see fit. 

Milei and the economists supporting him believe they have a two-step solution to vanquish inflation once and for all: First, stop printing money. And then, abolish the central bank.

"One key weapon in the arsenal of populist governments printing money to finance deficits. And by taking that option away, taking it off the table, you eliminate that danger, which is hyperinflation," says Ocampo, who briefly advised Milei on how to achieve his campaign promise of abolishing Argentina's central bank and converting its debt to U.S. dollars to prevent future administrations from ever running the money printer again.

But Milei hasn't pushed forward on that pledge. Scholars from the Cato Institute say failure to dollarize and abolish the central bank would imperil his entire agenda. 

"I personally think that they could have dollarized raised already," says Cato's Daniel Raisbeck. "They're really going after the deficit. And it's just a political decision…if the left-wing Peronists return to power, it will be far easier for them to print money again if you have the central bank, if you have the peso. Whereas if you dollarize, it's practically impossible for them to revert it."

Despite the intense media criticism, attempts to strip his powers in Congress, the political inexperience of his party members, and opposition in the streets, the Senate approved the bill with a tie-breaking vote from his vice president, giving Milei a watered-down version of the legislation he wanted—but a victory nonetheless. 

The bill will allow him to privatize parts of the energy sector, cut labor regulations, and grants Milei temporary emergency legislative powers to push his agenda forward without congressional approval for one year, which Ocampo says is "a bad tool" but one that has become "a typical Argentine thing" that all of his predecessors have used. 

Milei has since used that emergency power to push forward the privatization of the national airline. 

Grinner says his biggest concern is that Milei's movement won't outlast his presidency. He once was close to Milei, but more recently they've had a falling out. He says that Milei has pushed away many former allies, replacing them with sycophants and political operatives from prior administrations. They may sabotage his libertarian agenda and "la casta" will reassert power.

"I told him this is happening, they are hiring militants. They are bringing in Kirchnerists," he says.

Argentinian society remains divided on Milei. His public approval rating dipped below 50 percent six months into his term, though he still remains far more popular than his predecessor. 

"Today, there is no political alternative," says Seman. "The opposition is very discredited, and the opposition doesn't even realize that it is discredited….The opposition is waiting for Milei's apocalypse." 

Whether or not that will happen will become clear during the 2025 midterms. 

In his inaugural address to the nation, Milei was clear that as he followed his mandate to steer Argentina in a different, more libertarian direction, the road ahead would not be easy. 

"A hundred years of failure don't come undone in a day, but one day it begins, and today is that day," says Milei.

Raisbeck says that if Milei succeeds, it will "change the game in the entire region" and make it easier for other Latin American countries to adopt libertarian reforms. But on the flip side, "if it fails in Argentina, then it will be very, very difficult for libertarians in the next few decades to put our message across because the left will always be pointing to that example if it doesn't succeed."

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MUSIC CREDITS: Peter Spacey/"Roar"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Eden Avery/"Melting Glass"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Silver Maple/"We Are Giants"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Frank Jonsson/"That Notebook"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Roots and Recognition/"Running through the Dark"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Jay Varton/"Go That Extra Mile"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Marten Moses/ "Keep Them for Me Until It's Over"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; "Empty Rooms" by Gal Lev via Artlist; Craft Case/"Clear as Day"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Michael Rothery/"Turncoat"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Marten Moses/"Strange Technologies"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Dew of Light/"Sumerian Paradise"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; "A Journey in Time" by Nobou via Artlist; "Hero Is Born" by idokay via Artlist; "Above the Clouds" by Theatre of Dealys via Artlist; "Drops" by Oran Loyfer via Artlist; Bonnie Grace/"Misguided Paths"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Bonnie Grace/"Light-Footed"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; Alec Slayne/"Conspiracy Inc."/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; "Fuerza Delicada" by Adrián Berenguer via Artlist; "Aurora Waves" by Theatre of Delays via Artlist; Silver Maple/"Particle Emission"/courtesy of epidemicsound.com; "Mountain Climbing" by C.K. Martin via Artlist

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