CETRI
In September, previous allies in Congress deserted him to push through spending on healthcare, universities and disability benefits, overturning the President’s veto. Fuerza Patria, the Peronist bloc, triumphed in the Buenos Aires provincial elections on 7 September, trouncing Milei’s La Libertad Avanza alliance by 47 to 34 per cent. The currency markets responded by dumping the peso, driving inflation back up and raising Argentina’s already high debt-servicing costs. Polls for the mid-term elections showed the Peronists inching ahead.
With great fanfare, the Trump Administration came to Milei’s aid, laying on a White House visit, a $20 billion currency swap—at a fixed exchange rate, not the market price—and talk of another $20 billion in private and sovereign-fund lending. But Trump was alert to the risk of being associated with a loser and Milei’s presidential term had another two years to run. ‘If he does win, we’re going to be very helpful’, Trump told the press, with Milei sweating by his side. ‘And if he doesn’t, we’re not going to waste our time.[2] Argentina’s liberal-conservative media had been ambivalent about Trump, not relishing his threat of imposing a rare-earths deal on the country in exchange for his help. But at this point, he was seen as the country’s only saviour. The 2025 mid-term elections became a test of nerves and a national referendum on the Trump bailout.
Notably, then, the 68 per cent turnout on 26 October was a record low, with opposition voters staying at home. Milei’s lla won 41 per cent of the popular vote to the Peronist bloc’s 34 per cent, increasing its caucus in the Chamber of Deputies from 37 to 111 seats, gobbling up the centrist vote, while the Peronists ended up with 99 seats (of 257). The political upshot was to deny the opposition the two-thirds majority needed to overturn presidential vetoes, freeing Milei to forge ahead with his agenda of slashing Argentina’s once-proud welfare state, rolling back workers’ rights and demolishing the networks of Peronist politicians, trade unionists, social leaders and neighbourhood groups that he calls la casta.
How to explain the irruption of this figure onto a political stage hitherto dominated by suavely besuited professionals ? In a more stable socio-economic context Milei, with his badly dyed hair, leather jacket and messianic ultra-libertarian rants, might have remained a celebrity eccentric with no political future. In an Argentina racked by the strain of high-level inflation—two decades of double-digit rates following the 2001 crisis, then two years of triple digits in 2023–24—amid the mutual exhaustion of the existing political blocs, he became a plausible presidential candidate. Even his aggressive style has generated a surprising degree of empathy, since it is understood as a response to the violence and bullying he suffered at the hands of his businessman father. A significant layer of the population perceives him as an angry victim, in tune with a society that itself feels victimized and angry with politics, and sees in him an outsider, underestimated and discriminated against, just like themselves. In other words, the Milei phenomenon must be understood as the expression of a deeper crisis in Argentine society.
Provisionally, it might be summarized like this. The country’s neoliberal ‘normalization’ in the 1990s ended in a cataclysmic crash in 2001, which generated a new round of working-class militancy. Under Néstor Kirchner’s left-Peronist leadership, this layer established a new social compact that proved capable of blocking all attempts by the Argentine bourgeoisie to roll it back, even as the economy entered a crisis of falling profitability and chronic inflation. In a situation of prolonged political stalemate, Milei could project himself as the only leader capable of decisive change. He thus needs to be located in the context of this cycle of resistance, which must in turn be set in the long-run history of Peronism.
Three Peronist generations
Peronism often baffles outside observers, particularly those with a formation in the political categories of the European world. The movement was born in the early 1940s, a moment of high labour militancy in the newly industrializing and urbanizing country, from a fusion of disparate workers’ organizations under the leadership of the charismatic Juan Domingo Perón, a junior figure in the military government of the time. Perón, a young colonel, found in the Secretariat of Labour and Social Security—then a minor institution in the state hierarchy—a base from which to bring about a novel project of social integration, binding together a multi-class alliance under the direction of the state, the guarantor and arbiter of national unity. To this end, he issued orders for the expansion of labour rights, collective bargaining, retirement benefits, a minimum wage, paid vacations, medical care and so forth, to draw organized labour into the new corporatist order, alongside other social sectors and fractions of capital.[3]
However, the Argentinian bourgeoisie reacted with alarm and displeasure. Pressure from his fellow officers, suspicious of his popularity, led to Perón’s removal in October 1945. The historic mobilization of 17 October—memorialized in the musical named for his feisty young wife, Evita—disrupted the neutralization process. The working classes took to the streets to demand the release of their leader in such numbers that Perón was freed the next day. A year later, he was elected president at the head of a remarkably heterogeneous coalition, ranging from parts of the left to nationalists of the extreme right. The alliance opposing him was no less diverse : conservatives, radicals, socialists and communists, who read Peronism as a fascist threat, justifying an alliance with the traditional elites. Since then, Argentine political life has been organized around the Peronist versus anti-Peronist split, a dividing line running through the left itself.
Thus an unprecedented relationship was formed : a military nationalist politician, who had sought to contain the labour movement to prevent its radicalization, found himself interpellated by a dynamic working class that became the mainstay of his leadership. This rootstock was the basis for the continuity of Peronism as a political force, setting it apart from other nationalist phenomena of the 1940s, such as Varguismo in Brazil. From then on, the relationship between Perón and the workers took on a unique, ambivalent form : while integrated under a logic of subordination to the state, the unions retained a capacity for pressure and influence that in turn conditioned Perón’s leadership. The persistent mistrust of the big bourgeoisie—which Perón tried unsuccessfully to incorporate—along with greater than expected union autonomy defined the contradictory relationship between Peronism and the working class : between integration and resistance.[4]
Overthrown by a civil-military coup in 1955—with liberal and anti-Peronist support in the armed forces—the first Peronist experiment was shut down. But during the seventeen years of proscription that followed, Peronism consolidated its status as a popular force, sustained by yearning for a lost era. Perón’s fall led not to passivity but to an intensification of workers’ struggles known as the Peronist resistance. Despite the severe repression, unions staged strikes and organized clandestine actions that kept the link between Peronism and the working class alive. From the 1960s, this intertwined with a new wave of radicalization influenced by the Cuban Revolution and national-liberation movements in the Third World. A new militancy in the labour movement and the strengthening of the radical left reached their peak with the Cordobazo uprising of 1969. For the first time, a mass workers’ and students’ rebellion overflowed Peronism itself, opening up a crisis of hegemony that undermined the Onganía dictatorship and accelerated the regime’s decomposition. This escalation led to Perón’s return from exile in 1973. His third government, however, did not catalyse popular mobilization but set out to contain it ; to that end, Perón promoted the right wing of his movement against the left. After his death in 1974, this reactionary drift was laid bare : the Peronist right went on the offensive, led by his third wife, dismantling the revolutionary organizations and unleashing open repressive violence—paving the way for the 1976–83 military dictatorship, sustained by the most systematic state terror in Argentine history.
Yet although the repression profoundly reshaped the country’s social and political structures, it failed to eliminate the trade unions or to erode Peronism’s influence among the popular classes. Even underground, the trade-union movement preserved its fundamental structures and reemerged with astonishing force in the 1982 general strike, a key moment in the dictatorship’s decline. Perón’s death had left the movement without its unifying figure, however, and the electoral defeat of 1983—the first under fully democratic conditions—marked the start of a crisis of orientation. At the same time, the exhaustion of the import-substitution model and onset of the neoliberal offensive began to erode the material basis of the Peronist social project. Under pressure of the 1980s debt crisis, the imf and World Bank pushed unceasingly for a restructuring of capital and state in Argentina through the subordinate internationalization of the economy.[5] Amid rising unemployment, hyperinflation and institutional breakdown, the composition of the working class was altered by these processes, fragmenting into formal and informal layers.
When the Peronist party returned to office under Carlos Menem in 1989, it lost no time in adapting to this transformed situation—much like European social democracy in the same period. With the support of the trade-union leadership, Menem pushed through the prescribed raft of imf measures : financial and trade liberalization, market deregulation, privatization of strategic state-owned companies and the implementation of a currency regime that tied the peso to the dollar, imposing drastic monetary discipline as the greenback strengthened after 1995. The Peronists were ejected in the 1999 elections as this model entered into crisis. Its collapse came under the brief administration of Fernando de la Rúa (1999–2001), leader of the liberal-conservative Radical Civic Union (ucr), whose alliance with sections of the centre left saved Peronism from bearing responsibility for the convertibility model’s failure.
Popular blockade
The turning point came with the explosion of December 2001, high summer in Argentina : a massive popular uprising that forced De la Rúa to resign, the breakdown of convertibility and a record default on the country’s debt of $130 billion. Argentina’s gdp contracted by over 16 per cent as the economy plunged into a slump. Some 52 per cent of the population fell below the poverty line ; many struggled to afford food. The fixed exchange rate, which had initially helped contain hyperinflation, ended up devastating the socio-economic order. Public services collapsed, salaries and pensions went unpaid. The spontaneous mobilizations of December 2001 crystallized into popular self-help networks to organize food cooperatives or distribute the new government’s emergency coupons. The leading role here fell not to the unions—although they would gradually recover their capacity for action—but to the movements of unemployed workers, the so-called piqueteros, who emerged greatly strengthened from the crisis. Together with the radicalization of the middle classes and the reactivation of the unions, this bloc put an end to the cycle of neoliberal hegemony and paved the way for a new political situation.
Paradoxically, it was the same Peronist party that had administered neoliberal adjustment which now channelled the resistance to it, under the leadership of a formerly Menemist couple : Néstor Kirchner, President from 2003–07, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, from 2007–15. Like the pri in Mexico, apra in Peru or mnr in Bolivia, Peronism had switched from developmentalism to neoliberalism in the 1980s. But unlike them, it managed to reinvent itself as the privileged channel of Argentine progressivism in the 21st century, forming part of the regional shift that a New York Times reporter would dub the ‘pink tide’.[6] This new brand of left Peronism—Kirchnerism, as it came to be called—emerged as an attempt at a populist reconstruction of the political order through the partial channelling of social demands, without undoing the structural transformations of the 1990s ; it thus had a conservative character in the Gramscian sense of trasformismo. It revived the logic of classical Peronism, responding to the new militancy by integrating the mobilized sectors, recognizing their capacity for pressure but channelling conflict within the state apparatus as an instrument of regulation.
Buoyed by rising Chinese demand for commodities, the Kirchner government set in place a new model of redistribution, more modest than that of classical Peronism, but adjusted to contemporary conditions. It drew in the popular-resistance movements as local relays for welfare programmes and re-empowered the trade unions through a framework of collective bargaining. Under Kirchnerism, the state resumed an active role through strategic re-nationalizations—especially of pension funds and the oil company, ypf—and subsidies to sustain utilization rates in key sectors of industrial production. A redistributive social-welfare net was broadened through the expansion of a universal child allowance, the extension of pension coverage and a rising minimum wage. Kirchner’s team rebuffed the punitive demands of the imf and claims by assorted hedge funds that Argentinians be further impoverished to settle wealthy investors’ bad bets. In this they were backed by the organized strength of the piqueteros and other working-class groups, which constituted what Adrián Piva has called a ‘popular blockade’ against imf-style structural adjustment.[7]
Initially, Kirchnerism’s programme of redistributive recovery generated a period of relative stability and was even backed by sections of the capitalist class. However, as the long global commodities cycle ran its course and the social mobilizations lost momentum, the strategy began to strain ties with fractions of business.[8] In 2008, Fernández de Kirchner’s attempt to raise the sliding-scale taxes on agricultural exports triggered a head-on confrontation with Argentine agribusiness, which quickly escalated into a political battle drawing in first the agrarian middle classes, then the bulk of big business and the urban petite bourgeoisie, which rediscovered its traditional anti-Peronism. Although politically costly, the confrontation provided the Fernández de Kirchner team with an epic narrative that it had lacked until then, casting it against an archetypal enemy, the ‘rural oligarchy’, historically associated with elitism and hostility towards the popular classes. But Kirchnerism’s success depended almost entirely on the favourable external context : terms of trade allowed for redistribution without seriously affecting accumulation. With the Chinese slowdown after 2012, that margin began to narrow. A long cycle of stagnation set in, which persists to this day. Weakened by Néstor Kirchner’s death in 2010, the left-Peronist project showed growing signs of exhaustion : sluggish growth, inflation and macroeconomic imbalance.
In 2015, the Peronist presidential candidate was narrowly defeated by the conservative Mauricio Macri, son of a construction magnate, and his Propuesta Republicana party (pro). Macri proceeded cautiously at first with his pro-business agenda, wary of provoking working-class resistance. Emboldened by success in the 2017 legislative elections, including the strategic province of Buenos Aires, his government brought a social-security reform bill before Congress, still moderate in scope but symbolically significant. The social reaction was swift. Violent police repression of the mass protests in December 2017 brought no more than a pyrrhic victory for the conservative bloc. Though weakened, the ‘popular blockade’ retained a social veto. From then on, the Macri government was on the defensive, punished by global financial markets for the stalling of structural reforms and plunging in the polls.
But when the Peronists returned to office in 2019, it was clear they had no solution. Seeking to triangulate a reconciliation with the markets, Kirchner shifted the party to the right, pushing forward Alberto Fernández, a lacklustre technocrat, as President, with herself as vp. The result was a weak and contradictory administration, which managed the crisis with a dissonant combination of statist discourse and subordination to the imf, a rationalization of regression in the name of the ‘lesser evil’. As real wages fell and poverty grew, the official discourse on rights and social justice lost all material correlation. This was worse than hypocrisy ; the self-congratulatory narrative of a ‘progressive, statist, redistributive government’ contrasted ever more glaringly with the daily experience of millions of Argentinians facing persistent stagflation, deteriorating public services, declining incomes and worsening work conditions. The Fernández government’s mismanagement of the pandemic—marked by prolonged lockdowns, a high death rate and a steep economic contraction—turned discontent into rage.
Breaking the stalemate
The successive failure of the two major political coalitions, Peronist and conservative, fuelled a crisis of representation. The situation suggests a variant of Gramsci’s notion of a catastrophic stalemate—an equilibrium of forces in which neither side, A nor B, is able to impose its project in an effective way, although each retains the ability to veto the other’s. In Gramsci’s account of Caesarism, this opens the way for an unexpected irruption : an alternative leadership, C, that imposes itself as a way out of the impasse, displacing the traditional contenders.[9] As Gramsci emphasized, however, the stalemate was not a matter of static paralysis but of the mutual degradation of both sides, wrought by the structural wear and tear of prolonged struggle. In Argentina’s case, however, the protracted social stalemate has been asymmetrical in its effects. The popular bloc against austerity has been undergoing a long, silent, slow-motion defeat, the result of a decade of economic stagnation and proliferating informal employment, with its debilitating effects on collective action ; high and persistent inflation that has exhausted the population ; and the deep sense of frustration and disorientation generated by the failure of the Fernández government.[10]
At the same time, the stalemate brought about a radicalization of the small and medium business classes that enabled the meteoric rise of a new far right. Deprived of redistributive content, state intervention itself became the object of popular contempt. The rejection of the casta or the ‘parasitic state’ was not just the result of a reactionary cultural offensive, but an expression of popular disenchantment with a form of government that, while claiming to be a social state—el estado presente, in Kirchnerist terms—was administering impoverishment. Javier Milei’s libertarian tirades, with their extravagant anarcho-capitalist flourishes, appeared as the polar opposite of twenty years of exhausted statism. On the political right, meanwhile, the shipwreck of the Macri experiment consolidated the idea that Argentina would be ungovernable if the veto power of Peronism was not broken. Social protest, which was more autonomous than assumed, was identified with Peronism—itself more collaborationist than the stereotype admitted—and the piquete (picket line) was interpreted as a symbol of street coercion, with trade unions and social movements cast as the strong arm of an informal establishment. The assumption was that Macri had failed through excessive gradualism. Logically, the new strategy required neoliberal ‘shock therapy’, backed up where necessary with the use of force. The expectation was that Macri—or a future candidate of his—would put this into practice. But the emergence of Milei, with no organic ties to the traditional parties, would offer a purer and more aggressive embodiment of that mandate.
Born in 1970, Milei is the son of a self-made businessman who, during the Menem years, had expanded his fleet of Buenos Aires buses into a debt-leveraged used-car business and investment company with various real-estate interests, meanwhile bullying and beating his son, whose little sister Karina became his only protector and friend. After obtaining diplomas in mathematical economics at various peripheral institutions, Milei found work as an aide to airline magnate Eduardo Eurnekian, a more successful self-made man. An encounter with Murray Rothbard’s ‘Monopoly and Competition’ essay converted him to ultra-libertarianism. In the mid-2010s he achieved notoriety as a raucous tv panellist, propounding the dogma of the free market in its most extreme form. His belligerent style and unbridled insults, lashing out against the political establishment, made him an easily identifiable media celebrity, at the same time projecting the image of a radical outsider. As with the new right elsewhere, scandal became a sign of sincerity ; proof that he was not a conventional politician who measures every word according to the ‘tyranny of political correctness’. Incendiary and provocative, Milei thus became the catalyst for accumulated disaffection, which was translated into popular enthusiasm for a project promising the demolition of the state and revenge against the privileges of la casta.
Leveraging his trash-tv persona, Milei entered national politics as a deputy for the city of Buenos Aires in the legislative elections of 2021 ; his newly formed lla won 14 per cent. As the crisis worsened through the depths of the pandemic, he made a splash by raffling off his parliamentary salary every month. Meanwhile, with inflation running at over 100 per cent and 40 per cent of the population living below the poverty line, the Peronist ruling clique confirmed its loss of touch with reality by picking the Minister of the Economy, Sergio Massa, as presidential candidate for 2023. Milei’s decision to run for the presidency was treated as a joke by the media but he ran an effective campaign, backed by the politico-technological expertise of the American far right and Brazil’s Bolsonaristas. More potent than the borrowed tropes about male suffering under ‘wokeness’ was Milei’s articulation of Argentinians’ weariness with inflation and economic crisis as a specifically anti-state—and so anti-Peronist—discourse. In November 2023 he won the second round by a landslide, 56 to 44 per cent.
Economic emergency
Installed in the Casa Rosada, Milei declared a state of economic emergency as grounds to abrogate extraordinary executive powers. He ordered a 100 per cent devaluation of the peso and issued a barrage of decrees and draft legislation to slash public spending, deregulate labour, abolish rent controls and cut taxes for foreign investors in Patagonia’s newly developed oil and gas fields. Large parts of the state apparatus were dismantled as the Milei administration slashed ministries, dismissed tens of thousands of public-sector workers, shuttered agencies and converted state-owned enterprises into corporations, prior to privatization. Two major legal instruments structured this offensive : the dnu 70 executive order, a package of neoliberal decrees imposed without legislative backing, and the Ley de Bases, an omnibus bill put before Parliament. The decrees included an authoritarian offensive against protestors, labelled ‘terrorists’ by Milei. An ‘anti-piquetero protocol’ which severely restricted legal demonstrations was enforced by a new level of police violence, using water cannon, baton charges, tear gas and pepper spray. The right to strike was denied to a broad category of ‘essential’ workers. For the first time since the dictatorship, these measures induced real fear and anti-government protests were reduced to the hardy few.
In his first months in office, Milei often seemed disoriented ; with only a few dozen deputies in the National Assembly, he lacked the power to get many of his decrees enacted as law. By the summer of 2024 he had secured the support of more traditional forces. Macri’s pro, representing the ‘serious’ right, helped to push the Ley de Bases through Congress and gave him the capacity to govern. As his administration stabilized, the traditional right’s electoral base migrated to the lla, allowing him to absorb those parties into a broader alliance. He also won parliamentary support from many Radical deputies and even from some Peronists linked to provincial governors, who depended on funds from the centre. This pragmatism represented tacit backing for harsh pro-business reforms to relaunch the process of accumulation. While the Argentine bourgeoisie initially considered Milei a risky bet, they soon rallied to him as the best chance to push through their long-delayed reform programme without it being derailed by social protests. In April 2025, the imf approved a further loan of $20 billion to cushion Milei’s relaxing of capital controls and controlled float of the peso.
Support for Milei held up surprisingly strongly for the first eighteen months, despite the hardship inflicted by his shock therapy—‘the most drastic fiscal adjustment ever seen in a peacetime economy’, according to an imf official.[11] Inflation began to fall from the summer of 2024, dropping below 40 per cent the following spring. The government shrugged off the scandal of the $libra cryptocurrency, which Milei had endorsed but which turned out to be a ‘rug pull’ Ponzi operation. But by summer 2025, social fatigue with the high costs of the deflationary policy on incomes and economic activity was beginning to make itself felt. Polls showed a gradual decline of confidence in the government and social unrest was on the rise—not on a mass scale, but growing more persistent.[12] In late August 2025, leaked audio recordings that detailed Karina Milei’s 3 per cent rake-off from public payments for medicines for the disabled threatened more serious damage.
In Argentina, as elsewhere, attitudes to corruption can be ambivalent ; it may be tolerated if the economy is relatively buoyant, but when times are hard they are perceived as a double affront. The sacrifice that Argentinians had accepted in order to overcome inflation and stagnation now seemed disrespected by those who were pocketing public money while demanding ever-tighter belts. The impact was immediate ; lla’s setback in the 7 September Buenos Aires provincial elections revealed the fragility of the economic situation. Milei’s plan, sustained until then by business support and social passivity, began to fall apart. The Central Bank burned through Argentina’s foreign reserves to staunch a currency run and avoid an inflationary devaluation on the eve of the mid-term elections. Coupled with the rejection of Peronism by a substantial part of the electorate, Trump and Bessent’s highly public bailout, just twelve days before the vote, bought the anarcho-capitalist another two years.
Precedents
Milei can now move forward with harsher measures, starting with labour law, pensions and taxes. His victory speech indicated an openness to working with other parties, summoning the image of a nation united against a hated Peronist ‘populism’.[13] With the support of liberal-conservative parliamentary allies, the lla will be able to write a new political-economic dispensation into law. Milei’s goal, once inflation has been curbed, is to strengthen the peso and generate a ‘wealth effect’ through an inflow of dollars, enticed by deregulation, privatization and other offers for foreign investors, imposing a harsh discipline on uncompetitive industrial sectors and on labour. The programme is that of the imf ‘Washington Consensus’, of course, rather than ultra-libertarian anarcho-capitalism, whatever that might be. Gramsci’s conception of the stalemate needs amending for the Argentine case : here, the Caesarist third force, C, turns out in fact to be a mask for B, or the most effective way of implementing B’s programme.[14] Though he keeps up the ‘outsider’ patter, threatening to eat the elites, his agenda is strictly an insider one, praised by that mouthpiece of the ‘global elite’, the Economist, which is cool on Trump but thrills to ‘the power of tough-but-coherent economic messages that are proclaimed with clarity and conviction’ by Argentina’s president. Likewise, the imf, global hq of la casta, has fallen over itself to praise Milei’s ‘strong track record’.[15]
But the programme has been tried many times before in Argentina. In the past, it has ended in devaluation, acute recession and increased social unrest. When the strategy was first attempted under the dictatorship in the late 1970s, orchestrated by Economy Minister José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, it lasted barely three years before ending in a currency collapse and labour protests. By contrast, Menem sustained a similar strategy for a decade, decisively recasting the social compact in favour of capital before the catastrophic crash of 2001 and the rise of the ‘popular blockade’. The Macri administration also attempted a brief period of currency appreciation, which ended in a bank run and a sharp devaluation.
Whether Milei turns out to be a Martínez de Hoz, a Macri or a Menem depends to a large extent on whether the dollars keep flowing and whether Washington continues to play the role of financier of last resort. The government hopes that auctioning off the Vaca Muerta shale deposits in northeastern Patagonia, under development since 2010, will generate a sufficient injection of foreign investment to keep the restructuring on course. Time is a key factor. The gamble is that a relatively favourable context—wealth effect, monetary discipline, macro-economic stabilization—will provide a window of opportunity to lastingly reshape the social and political balance of forces before the next collapse. Even a mild economic recovery could help to consolidate elements of Milei’s heterogeneous coalition as a new popular bloc, under the hegemony of the right.
At present, his more committed supporters comprise around 30 per cent of the electorate. They include components of the traditionally anti-Peronist small and medium business class who formerly voted pro or ucr but were radicalized by the stalemate ; precarious youth, with no memory of the growth under the first Kirchner government, for whom Milei’s iconoclasm offers an expression of their own frustrations over the country’s blocked horizons ; and sections of the lower-middle class and informal working class, badly hit by inflation and loss of status, who no longer see the state as a guarantor of rights but as a source of corruption and inefficiency. Finally, Milei was backed by a cross-class protest vote, expressing popular disenchantment with the entire political set-up. The economic fortunes of these layers will be a key factor in shaping the next political cycle, but already it can be said that the corrosive effects of the Peronist stalemate and high inflation have resulted in a social sedimentation on the right that will be difficult to dispel in the near future, even if Milei’s project ends in crisis and disgrace.
Will the dollars keep flowing ? The government will be wagering that the vast amount of liquidity pumped out by the major central banks with each new crisis has to go somewhere. But Argentina doesn’t have much room for manoeuvre. To repair its credit standing means paying to roll over the enormous debts that are due next year. In conditions where geopolitical flashpoints coincide with geoeconomic chokepoints, and rising popular anger is taking unpredictable political forms, any number of local crises could lead to another inflation spike, a hike in interest rates, the collapse of indebted corporate borrowers or leveraged lenders, or the decimation of managed funds if the ai bubble bursts. With currency controls lifted and the peso committed to a dollar peg, however elastic, Argentina will be no better protected from global economic turbulence than it was in 1999.
Moreover, Washington will have bigger fish to fry. The October 2025 bailout was already disproportionate, a measure of the irrationality generated by the Trump administration’s political commitments. At $20 billion, the currency swap and accompanying bond purchases represent one of the largest direct-aid packages ever granted by the us to Latin America. One would have to go back to Mexico’s 1995 Tequila crisis to find a bailout of comparable size. But that operation involved the us’s main trading partner, the third leg of the newly created nafta, and responded to a global financial tremor that was threatening to destabilize the entire region. Similarly, Trump’s brazen intervention in Argentina’s mid-terms could be compared to Clinton’s somewhat more discreet backing for Yeltsin’s second presidential bid in 1996, when Washington turned a blind eye as large chunks of a $10 billion imf loan were siphoned off to secure his re-election. But again, Russia was a key strategic partner that needed to be kept sweet while nato expansion was under way.
The situation with Argentina is very different. Economically and geopolitically, the country occupies a lower rank in Washington’s mind. The us economy itself is under greater strain today, and the ‘America First’ radicalization cuts across imperial largesse. Perhaps to quieten maga social-media pressure, Bessent dropped a broad hint after Milei’s position stabilized with the Argentine mid-term results that us support would henceforth be more limited.[16] Argentina is already by far the largest borrower from the imf, owing nearly $42 billion of the Fund’s pot of $120 billion, compared to $11 billion for Egypt and $9 billion for Ukraine, both far more important geopolitically. In addition, the local conditions are less propitious now than they were in the days of Menem and Martínez de Hoz. In the late 1970s and early 90s, average wages in Argentina were at a relatively high level by Latin American standards, which partially cushioned the impact of the deflationary crunch, while the peso was relatively weak. Milei’s initial programme has distorted these relations : real wages have been held down, while the peso has been kept unsustainably strong to combat inflation, benefiting for a while from the anchor of an unusually weak dollar. In this context, a forced devaluation would no longer be softened by the income cushion of previous cycles and could trigger a major social crisis, with no margin for tolerance. The political fallout could then be used to justify more overtly authoritarian solutions, already presaged in Milei’s crackdown on the piqueteros ; though this in itself could not provide economic relief.
Completing the job
A comparison with the far right under Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil may help to define the specificity of the Milei phenomenon. In style, they are poles apart. Milei’s long hair and heavy-metal sideburns are matched by the bohemian eccentricity of his personal life, his intense relationships with his sister and éminence grise, Argentina’s de facto First Lady, and his dog, Conan, whom Milei claimed was actually his son. Bolsonaro promoted a clean-cut patriarchal rancher persona and surrounded himself with evangelical pastors and military figures. But both emerged as a radicalized response to the failure of the traditional right, Macri in Argentina and Temer in Brazil, to retain electoral support while rolling back the social legislation of Kirchnerism and the Lula–Dilma pt.
Rhetorically, Milei’s great strength as a politician has been to convey his actual strategy in vivid terms that can be repeated over and over. The two-part message is very simple : to drive through an anti-statist neoliberal revolution and to turn the defeat of the social veto and the piqueteros into a definitive obliteration. That doesn’t necessarily mean the destruction of the protean Peronist movement ; Menem’s bust has a place of honour in Milei’s Casa Rosada. But it does entail the elimination and discrediting of Kirchnerism and its incorporation into the public-administrative apparatus of the self-organized bodies of the working class. Bolsonaro, less intelligent, concentrated on anti-communist and ‘anti-woke’ tirades while his Finance Minister, an elite figure, far suaver than the President but no less driven by hatred for the electorally successful left, got on with the job of enforcing a pro-capital agenda more or less in silence.
Bolsonaro faced weaker opposition when he entered office in 2019, but his catastrophic mismanagement of the pandemic sparked huge protests and, like virtually every incumbent in Latin America, he was punished at the polls for the high death rates and economic suffering. Banned from political office until 2030 for his clumsy attempt to reverse the election result, he still commands a strong far-right movement based in the churches and the security apparatuses, which has absorbed the traditional conservative forces. It is eminently capable of returning to power, whether under his son Eduardo, his wife Michelle, the governor of São Paulo or some other candidate. Milei’s base is more of a ‘floating mass’ and his legacy yet to be built.
Attempts to conceptualize the successful right-wing experiments that have proliferated in recent years—Brazil, Argentina, India, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia and, of course, the us—cannot be confined to the counterposition of classical fascism and liberal democracy, whose upshot is a sterile polarization of the debate between those who cry ‘Fascism !’ at any right-wing advance and those who minimize the novelty and aggression of the new rights on the grounds that representative institutions remain intact. This was a mistake that the classical theorists of fascism did not make. Trotsky’s extraordinarily prescient writings on the rise of Nazism were framed above all as conjunctural analyses.[17] It was on that basis that he warned of the far right’s physical and institutional threat to the organizations of the labour movement and the need for a unitary policy to defend them—but not one subordinated to the liberal bourgeoisie, which had helped create the crisis on which the far right could feed. Trotsky, of course, writing from Prinkipo, saw fascism as a manifestation of capitalism’s terminal crisis ; like Lenin during the First World War, he called for the struggle against the symptom to be turned into a struggle against its cause. Otto Bauer, writing from inter-war Austria, thought the socialist revolution already defeated ; fascism’s aim was to eliminate reformist socialism. Angelo Tasca, writing from Nazi-occupied France, took the idea a stage further and defined it as a ‘posthumous and preventive counter-revolution’, setting out to complete the work once labour resistance had been decisively weakened.[18] In other words, the aggressive right becomes a functional force both when the ruling class is relatively weak and resorts to extreme measures to defeat a revolutionary threat—the situation Trotsky described—and when the ruling class is strong and decides to finish the job.
In Latin America, popular forces in a host of countries struggled in different and often muddled ways to find left exits from the neoliberal crises into which they were plunged in the 1980s and 90s. In the process, they lowered the continent’s gini measures of inequality a notch or two, extended literacy and built basic anti-poverty programmes, without—except in the honourable case of Cuba—breaking with capitalist property relations. The rise of China offered some space for alternative ventures : affordable infrastructure projects, export destinations, cheap goods. As with Argentina, many of those efforts reached an impasse or eroded from within. Nevertheless, from Porto Alegre’s public budgeting to the misiones of Caracas, the indigenous constitutionalism of Bolivia, Cuba’s music and Brazil’s critical theory, Latin American countries offered something of a beacon to the world for a decade or so in the 2000s, when the us was bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, blowing up speculative bubbles and expanding surveillance.
Looking at the Trump Administration’s strategy for Latin America—the us Navy fleet dispatched to the Caribbean, targeting the bedraggled remnants of the Bolivarian revolution, with Cuba the ultimate prize ; $20 billion and counting for Milei to deal with that ‘radical-left sick culture’ ; tariffs of 50 per cent on Lula’s Brazil, apparently at the behest of Eduardo Bolsonaro—the intention seems clear : finish the job. That doesn’t mean that Trump—or Milei—will succeed. In Argentina, the social veto re-emerged after the terror of the 1976–83 dictatorship, and again after the more wholesale social engineering of the Menem years. In Latin America as a whole, the difficulties experienced by peripheral capitalism in a continent with strong traditions of popular resistance and relatively weak forms of hegemonic absorption has catalysed generation after generation of revolt. Nevertheless, it provides a measure of what the left is now up against.
