“What begins with anger ends in shame.” Benjamin Franklin’s maxim illustrates the jarring turn of Javier Milei’s tour through Spain and, afterward, the bitter admission of Argentina’s stagnation: he went to teach the successful “Austrian School” to the country that grows the most in Europe, and upon returning he had to implicitly and explicitly acknowledge that the forecasts were wrong and that his model led to a harsh recession. The account of this strange journey — during which a libertarian seeks to raze social rights in a capitalist nation where the welfare state functions — includes, above all, his habitual display of insults, diplomatic uproars, and intolerance toward the press; among other things, he called the constitutional president of the mother country a thief and a dictator, treated journalists who asked questions with exemplary propriety poorly, and reveled in “kicking leftist butts.” For his compatriots, who have normalized mistreatment and rudeness, it was an emotional jolt, because we watched for a moment with lucid perspective — without the deceptive anesthesia of habit — what we endure every day and, tired, we let pass, and it embarrassed us that this aggressive and farcical figure was confused with the national identity: fortunately, that same day Lionel Messi was received with Asturian bagpipes, celebrated in Oviedo for his talent and unanimously praised for his modesty. Milei also managed to be unanimous: the horror and the critique were there across the board, and they declared the failure of his proselitizing trip. Two notable independent columnists — one from El País and another from El Mundo — sketched their impression: “It has been very stimulating to see a legendary bumpkin like Milei take on other people’s intelligence — said writer Manuel Jabois. He was a perfect chisgarabís. Hard to find today, on the international stage, someone of the cognitive and verbal level of a guy who goes around shouting left at everyone, someone with such a depressingly grammatical trajectory.” Cazurro is coarse and twisted; chisgarabís, an arrogant lout of poor judgment. The writer Antonio Lucas, for his part, called his Madrid media tour a “schizo circus” and his practice, a “swaggering stupidity,” and sought a biological explanation for such folly: “Overload of testosterone that adulterates the nature of reality.” After calling Kirchnerism “sinister,” Lucas then asked about the loquacious libertarian: “How can one tolerate such a person, and how does one survive if he runs the country?” The Prisa group’s newspaper ran an editorial in which the Argentine leader was described as “a charlatan with no self-control whom world leaders avoid.” Felipe González, who has nothing but disdain for the sanchista line and who even already announced his blank vote for the imminent elections, described Milei’s personality: “An ill-mannered man who insults everyone, and whose merit is being a ‘brilliant economist’ who is fixing everything, but Argentina is in recession! How can one go to a country to insult? It’s a breach of civic and political education.”
Beyond these darts —hard-fought by the Lion—, Felipe was touching the sore point, because some distracted Spaniards could come to believe incorrectly that this fantastic arrogant Argentine with coarse language had grown after achieving an extraordinary economic miracle, when the great drama of the moment is becoming clear — not only for heterodox thinkers and the suffering middle classes — that the supreme elixir does not work. Or at least that it causes serious collateral damage. The President himself, and this honors him, confessed to Radio Rivadavia that the indicators did not evolve as he and Luis Caputo expected, although he tried to shield himself with a partial factor: the external shock, the war in the Strait of Hormuz. The candid acknowledgment does not erase, however, prior unfounded triumphalism, arbitrary use of figures, and merciless bullying against the “mandrils” who warned him about these problems. Activity stalled again in August and is rapidly sliding toward a “technical recession”; industry and commerce have not found a floor, mass consumption contracted once more, and wholesale inflation continues to rise, this time indeed due to the international rise in oil prices. It is country risk that climbs steadily and dangerously, not scuba gas. And it is precisely Wall Street analysts and the plaza’s most orthodox economists who raise the strongest objections, arguing that this “coolness” — directly proportional to the rise of a strong sense of collective unease — stems from design mistakes in the plan, that it will not be “a walk in the park,” that the “best eighteen months of our lives” are nowhere near, and that, consequently, they could deliver bad electoral news to the government. The Financial Times, read by the world’s major investors, said that our country is marked by “a somber atmosphere, one year before the 2027 elections,” and recounted in a spicy article how wages have fallen since 2023 — by 10% — and how 300,000 jobs have been lost. For labor flexibilization combined with a faltering demand represents the worst of worlds for many workers and employers. Several polls show, despite the president’s denial, that people are only getting by month to month in survival mode: with more and more debts and delayed payments, in a desperate and troubling spiral. Silvia Naishtat covered this week a symposium at Tel Aviv University where eminent political scientists with their surveys in hand detected “Concern, uncertainty, and sadness” in many households. Lara Goyburu revealed there that 51% of the next voters will be women, a universe where Milei’s image is markedly scrawny: “They are the ones who directly feel the cost of the adjustment, because they usually manage household expenses, care for others, and sustain single-parent households — she noted. Cuts in health, education, and care for the elderly affect them.”
Ricardo Arriazu, once a reference for the Olivos prophet, said that all this meager growth is due to monetary policy. And another true icon of the profession — trained in the Chicago School of Economics —, Miguel Angel Broda, went further and explained on the Ahora Play streaming that the Government implemented a stabilization without coherence: they opened the economy with a cheap dollar and did not take into account the cost of transitioning from a regime that should “go through four or five governments” to “become a normal country” and that, therefore, should be capable of passing many electoral tests: “If we don’t stimulate domestic demand and we don’t stimulate reactivation,” social mood could revive left-wing populists and we could return to the “antics” like a banana republic, he reiterated: “The cost of the transition is desperate.” We must make the change, he told Maxi Montenegro, but we also must give time to companies to adapt: of ten that close, five do so for no reason. “Opening up is essential to end the decadence, but it is also crucial to create conditions so that Argentine talent can adapt.” According to Broda there is no room to alter fiscal policy, but there is for exchange and monetary policy. Will he be right? Who knows. The truth is that it is not the Spanish socialist workers —the “leftists” as always— who are signaling alarms. The Government may need to lower its arrogance and start listening.
————————————