A foul-mouthed, far-right populist who has been described as a cross between Boris Johnson and the killer doll Chucky is in pole position to become president of South America’s second-largest economy as Argentina chooses its next leader on Sunday against a backdrop of anti-establishment fury and economic disarray.
Election-eve polls suggest Javier Milei, a charismatic and wild-haired political outsider who found fame pontificating on television chatshows about monetary policy and sex, could sneak a first-round win, although a November runoff is likely.
At his final campaign event in Buenos Aires on Wednesday, the 53-year-old “anarcho-capitalist” addressed a packed 15,000-capacity stadium from a stage adorned with a banner proclaiming him “The Only Solution” to Argentina’s economic malaise.
“Whatever it takes, we have to win on Sunday,” bellowed Milei. “It’s going to be the first fucking round! Round fucking one!”
“We’ve already won the World Cup. Now we’re going to win control of this country with our ideas of freedom,” claimed Ramiro Marra, a close ally from Milei’s coalition, La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances).
In suburban Buenos Aires, Milei’s Peronist rival, the finance minister, Sergio Massa, asked factory workers for support despite the slump his government has overseen, with 40% of Argentina’s 47 million citizens living in poverty amid triple-digit inflation. “It makes me really angry when I hear those who want to govern Argentina say we are a shitty country,” Massa said of his rightwing opponent’s apocalyptic portrayals of the South American nation. “We’re a wonderful country.”
The third main contender, the conservative former security minister Patricia Bullrich, denounced Milei’s “bad and dangerous” ideas, which include abolishing the central bank, loosening gun laws and even legalizing the sale of human organs. Bullrich urged parents to discourage their children from supporting Milei, whom many disillusioned young Argentinians consider “a saviour or messiah”.
Milei, a freewheeling TV personality who only entered politics in 2021 after being elected to congress, is often compared to Donald Trump, whom he has praised. “There is an alignment with all those who are willing to fight against socialism at the international level,” Milei told the Economist last month, minimizing Trump’s role in the January 6 Capitol riots.
Others liken the Argentinian to Brazil’s former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who this week urged “all Argentinians” to support Milei’s push for “real change”. “I’m really rooting for you,” Bolsonaro said in a video message, promising to attend Milei’s inauguration.
Bolsonaro’s congressman son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, will fly to Buenos Aires for Sunday’s vote, as will Chile’s ultra-conservative former presidential candidate, a member of the European parliament for Spain’s far-right party Vox.
The similarities between Milei’s campaign and the one that brought Bolsonaro to power in Brazil are perhaps unsurprising, given that they feature some of the same characters, including Milei’s social media chief, Fernando Cerimedo, who was part of Bolsonaro’s victorious 2018 team.
Five years ago, Bolsonaro won power pledging to champion Brazil’s “cidadãos de bem” (upstanding citizens), while Milei promises to govern for all “argentinos de bien”. Milei has organized purportedly spontaneous, but actually highly choreographed, rallies of followers just as Bolsonaro staged shows of support by flying into small-town airports packed with groupies.
Both men paint themselves as heaven-sent anti-communist crusaders on divine missions to save their countries from unpatriotic leftist crooks. Both have made unfounded claims about electoral fraud.
On Thursday, Milei alleged that, according to his experts, between 2.5% and 5% of votes for his party were not counted in August’s primary, which serves as a dress rehearsal for the election and which he won. “There were gross irregularities, theft of ballots, polling booths where it seemed that we had zero votes when technically it is impossible if we got a third of the votes,” Milei claimed, mimicking Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s voting system, which culminated in the 8 January 2023 insurrection in Brasília.
Asked during an interview on Crónica TV whether he expected fraud on Sunday, Milei replied: “Yes, obviously.”
The prospect of an Argentinian amalgam of Bolsonaro and Trump taking power has horrified progressive voters and also, apparently, Pope Francis, whom Milei has bad-mouthed as a “lefty son of a bitch”.
“We feel stunned … we’ve never seen a politician like this before,” said Father José María “Pepe” Di Paola, a Buenos Aires priest who is close to the pope.
Di Paola, who works in some of the most deprived shantytowns in Argentina’s capital, said he was most disturbed by Milei’s vow to slash social spending and attacks on the idea of social justice. “Not even Bolsonaro said such things,” the priest said.
Speaking this week, Pope Francis sent a thinly veiled warning about the dangers of “pied piper of Hamelin”-style populists and “messianic clowns”. “There is only one Messiah,” the pope said, without naming Milei.
Experts say a Milei victory would probably precipitate a period of severe turbulence. “The major risk is governability, which is a polite way of saying social and political chaos,” said Benjamin Gedan, the director of the Wilson Center’s Latin America Program.
“The Argentine population is heavily mobilized and very politically engaged ... If [Milei] truly tries to implement a kind of a brutal and abrupt austerity program, that would provoke Argentines to defend their economic health and ability to maintain a reasonable quality of life. So you could just see a really chaotic scenario,” Gedan added. “This is a G20 economy, about to roll the dice and embrace some really radical policy ideas.”
The value of Argentina’s peso has plummeted against the dollar in recent weeks – something experts partly attribute to Milei’s attacks on a currency he wants to ditch.
Even Milei allies accept his triumph would usher in upheaval. “Whoever wins, there will be chaos,” predicted Cerimedo. “The only difference will be who handles the chaos best.”
