Will the red carpet be out? Emmanuel Macron is expected this Saturday, November 16 in Argentina to meet ultraliberal President Javier Milei, admirer of Donald Trump. The French president hopes to “attach” his counterpart to the “international consensus” on the eve of the G20 in Brazil. His arrival is scheduled for the end of the day in Buenos Aires, where he will be received for a one-on-one dinner with Javier Milei. They will speak again on Sunday.
The moment is not chosen at random. Javier Milei will have just returned from Mar-a-Lago, Florida, where he met the President-elect of the United States. The two men have in common a policy of clear cuts in public spending, which Donald Trump wants to implement when he returns to the White House in January, and which the Argentinian, who describes himself as an “anarcho-capitalist “, practice since he came to power eleven months ago. Both also toy with the idea of turning their backs on major multilateral climate agreements and objectives. “Macron will urge Milei not to adopt Trump’s worldview,” writes the English-language daily Buenos Aires Times.
In this context, Emmanuel Macron presents himself as an emissary from Europe, hoping to “overcome” the “divergences”, particularly environmental, to “convince Argentina to continue to participate in the international consensus”, underlines the Elysée. And therefore “connect President Milei to the priorities of the G20”, in which they will participate Monday and Tuesday in Rio de Janeiro, before it is too late… Because Argentina has just withdrawn its delegation from the COP29 climate negotiations, Baku (Azerbaijan), and speculation is rife about its possible exit from the Paris Climate Agreement. A gesture that Donald Trump himself made during his first term. “No decision has yet been made,” Milei’s Foreign Minister, Gerardo Werthein, assured the American daily on Thursday. New York Times.
A test for Emmanuel Macron’s influence
Emmanuel Macron is one of the only foreign leaders received in Buenos Aires since the election of his counterpart. Will he be able, with his experience in international circles, to have an influence on Javier Milei, whose first G20 summit this will be? This trip is in any case an opportunity for the French president to display his ability to dialogue with controversial, even ostracized, counterparts. And to make us forget some diplomatic setbacks and mixed successes. “It will be a test of Macron’s weight and influence in Latin America,” said Oscar Soria, an Argentine activist and veteran of climate negotiations, to AFP. “If he cannot convince Milei to stay in the Paris Agreement, it will show that he has lost his aura in the region,” he adds, fearing that this will open the way to other “cascading” withdrawals from South American countries.
The French president’s visit goes almost unnoticed in the local media. Starting with daily Argentinian life Clarinwho prefers to talk about the meeting between Javier Milei and the American actor Sylvester Stallone during a gala organized by Donald Trump. Same indifference in the pages of The Nation. In a dedicated article, the conservative newspaper evokes “a potentially conflicting agenda” between the two heads of state, mentioning Emmanuel Macron’s opposition to the signing of a free trade agreement between Mercosur, including Brazil and Argentina, and the European Union. The Argentine media also recalls the tense climate in France, marked by the anger of farmers.
But in the area of trade, the two heads of state should speak the same language. While the forced reforms to bring Buenos Aires back towards budgetary balance and try to emerge from a deep economic crisis are very controversial, France is rather complimentary, judging that they are “going in the right direction”. For its part, Paris wishes to intensify its relations with Argentina in the field of critical metals, while Eramet has just inaugurated a lithium mine in Argentina.
Juicy contracts in perspective
According to Ariel González Levaggi, of the Argentine Council for International Relations, Emmanuel Macron should also take advantage of his visit to advance the possible sale of French Scorpène submarines, even if the French presidency puts the progress of the negotiations into perspective. “Argentina currently does not have any operational submarines and for the Argentine Navy, this is a priority,” he explains to AFP, while emphasizing that Buenos Aires must “overcome a financing problem “.
On Sunday, Emmanuel Macron will also pay tribute to the twenty or so French people who disappeared and were murdered under the Argentine military dictatorship between 1976 and 1979, while Javier Milei is regularly accused by his detractors of revisionism on this dark page in the history of his country.
After Argentina, then the G20, Emmanuel Macron will go to Chile, where he will deliver a major speech on Thursday before the Congress in Valparaíso on his policy towards Latin America, 60 years after the visit of General Charles de Gaulle. “The one who was the first president of the Fifth Republic – which he himself founded in 1958 – then spent three weeks traveling practically the entire subcontinent”, recalls with nostalgia The Nation.