The election in Argentina is decided – stands between Milei and Massa

BUENOS AIRES. On one side: The climate and dictatorship denier who wants to ban abortions and solve poverty by allowing organ sales.

On the other: The current finance minister responsible for the country’s wrecked economy with inflation of almost 150 percent – and who promises more financial support.

Today, one of them is elected the next president of Argentina.

The economy takes center stage in every way as a self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist challenges the current finance minister in the fight for the presidency.

With rampant inflation, in October up to over 149.7 percent year-on-year, politicians’ repeated failed attempts to fix the wrecked economy, constant corruption allegations, and a parallel “blue” market for foreign currency, especially the US dollar, as no dare to save in the rapidly falling Argentine peso.

The longing for change. Quick change.

Want to scrap free school and healthcare

That has paved the way for challenger Javier Milei, who since announcing his candidacy has been described by pundits and opponents as “el loco,” the madman, and compared to America’s Donald Trump and Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro.

The favorite gimmick is a chainsaw, which he posed with as Leatherface from the “Chainsaw Massacre” during his election rallies to symbolize how he will cut government spending.

Argentina’s citizens have free healthcare and free education, receive large subsidies on electricity and gas and public transport. But Milei, who is an economist at heart, is voting for the state to only be responsible for the military, the police and the judiciary. Everything else must be privatized and paid for by the individual.

He wants to shut down the Argentine Riksbank and instead use the dollar as the country’s official currency.

Called the Pope “disgusting leftist”

Around 40 percent of the able-bodied population in Argentina have so-called “informal jobs”, where you work from day to day and receive the black payment directly in your hand. In this group, Milei has her biggest support.

Milei wants to solve poverty, among other things, by allowing organ sales, so that the poor can sell their kidney or part of their liver to someone who needs and can afford to pay.

Since last summer Milei has been dating the comedian and actress Fatima Florez, but above all he has been campaigning with his sister by his side.

And his five mastiff dogs, of course. They are clones of his former best friend, Conan, named after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character “Conan the Barbarian”.

The first clone was also named Conan, the other four have instead been named after the American conservative economists Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas.

Javier Milei does not believe climate change is due to human influence, has called the Pope a “disgusting leftist” and is anti-abortion, in a country that legalized women’s right to abortion as recently as December 2020.

Milei’s association with an equally controversial vice-presidential candidate, Victoria Villaruel, also attracts a specific type of voter, those who supported the former military dictatorship.

The vice-presidential candidate – a dictatorship denier

Villaruel has made a career as a denier of dictatorship, a lawyer with a special focus on redress, not for the victims of the regime, but for those who were affected by the resistance movement’s struggle for democracy in Argentina. It appeals to those who do not want to know how an estimated 30,000 people fell victim to the dictatorship’s political exodus between 1976 and 1983.

Despite Milei’s extreme proposal, this week a number of right-wing Latin American ex-presidents issued an open letter urging the people of Argentina to vote for Milei. In addition to Mauricio Macri, who himself was president of Argentina from 2015 to 2019 but failed to be re-elected, Colombia’s Iván Duque, Bolivia’s Jorge Quiroga, Chile’s Sebastián Piñera and Mexico’s Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox have also signed the letter along with former Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and the Peruvian Nobel laureate in literature Mario Vargas Llosa.

“The only way out for Argentina is political and economic freedom, respect for the rule of law and private property rights and the rules of the game for liberal democracy, social market economy, social justice and modernity,” it says the letter.

In the presidential election, Milei and his La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Forward) face Sergio Massa, who represents the left-wing populist Perionist party and is part of the left-wing coalition Unión por la Patria (Union for the Fatherland).

Challenges the Minister of Finance

The Perionist Party has been the strongest political force in Argentina since the late 1940s. But Massa is also finance minister in the current government, which has failed to get the country’s economy in order and is largely responsible for the rampant inflation, which according to analysts is expected to reach over 200 percent by 2023.

He won the candidacy after incumbent President Alberto Fernández chose not to run for re-election and has in part sought to distance himself, both from the incumbent and the scandal-ridden current Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, or CFK as she is often called.

But it has been a balancing act because CFK, who herself was president for two terms and before that the country’s first lady when her then-husband was president, has a strong cult-like following, despite being constantly at the center of corruption allegations.

When Javier Milei is running to cut Argentina’s government spending, Sergio Massa has instead invested in attracting voters by promising different types of support in the form of one-off payments to, for example, the large informal labor sector.

A campaign method that risks worsening the Argentine state economy even more, according to critics.

In the first round of elections, however, Massa unexpectedly drew greater voter support than Milei, with 37 to 30 percent of the vote.

Ahead of the second round, however, the eliminated center-right candidate Patricia Bullrich, who received 24 percent of the vote in the first round, has urged her voters to vote for Milei, and according to the latest opinion polls, he is leading by a few percentage points over the finance minister.

THE FACTS The election in Argentina – that’s how it happens

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