Javier Milei, a pro-Trump libertarian with no prior government experience, has won Argentina’s presidential election, pledging a Right-wing overhaul and advocating for reduced government intervention and privatisation. The Mail has more.
Argentina’s Economy Minister Sergio Massa conceded defeat to Milei in Sunday’s fiercely polarised presidential runoff even before the country’s electoral authority released official results.
Massa congratulated his opponent, a right-wing economist who has promised a dramatic shake-up for many of the nation’s institutions and welcomed frequent comparisons of him to Trump.
Immediately after Massa’s concession speech, the Argentine electoral authority released partial results: With 86.6% of votes tallied, Milei had 55.95% and Massa 44.04%.
With a Milei victory, the country will swing to the Right amid discontent over soaring inflation and rising poverty, and empower a freshman lawmaker who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist and got his start as a television talking head blasting what he called the “political caste”.
Milei brings a background perhaps more outlandish than his hero Trump’s prior to his rise to power.
The President-elect – who is also a prominent economist and radio chat-show host – has spoken about his preference for threesomes, why he believes poor people should be free to sell their body parts and how he enjoys communicating via telepathy with his dead dog for political advice.
Milei pulled off a shock victory in the primary round of voting ahead of the runoff election, in large part due to support from young voters who are so disenchanted with more ‘conventional’ politicians that they have turned to a man whose recent biography was titled El Loco (The Madman).
A political unknown until only a few years ago, Milei, 52, was elected to Argentina’s parliament in December 2021 as a member of La Libertad Avanza (‘Freedom Advances’).
He prefers to call himself an anarcho-capitalist, which means he’d like to rip up as much government intervention in people’s lives as he can and leave it all to the free market.
“If I had to choose between the state and the mafia, I would choose the mafia,” he once said. “Because the mafia has codes, the mafia adapts, the mafia doesn’t lie. And above all, the mafia competes.”
His ‘chainsaw plan’ to slash the bloated state includes getting rid of Argentina’s public health and education systems along with shuttering ten out of 18 Government departments.
Milei is also so anti-progressive he has repeatedly taken aim – rather bizarrely – at Pope Francis, his compatriot, calling him a “f***ing communist”, “communist turd” and the “representative of the evil one on Earth” in brutal social media posts, simply because of his perceived support for “social justice” and policies to help the poor.
“Jesus didn’t pay taxes,” Milei memorably tweeted.
His private persona appears to match the public image of an unpredictable eccentric.
At home he keeps four 200lb English Mastiffs. All named after famous right-wing economists – and each one cloned from a fifth, now-dead dog named Conan (after the Barbarian).
A recent biography by journalist Juan Luis González revealed Milei studies telepathy in his spare time and has a medium to “communicate” with Conan, who died in 2017, asking him for advice on political matters.
Milei hasn’t denied the claims. “What I do in my house is my business,” he told a Spanish newspaper.
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