“He’s not a president, he’s a prophet,” wrote Eduardo Bolsonaro about Javier Milei, celebrating his latest clairvoyance: the Lion had predicted the electoral victory of his brother over Lula da Silva. That mere expression of desire suddenly turned him into a consummate seer. The flattery from Jair’s son, however, hides a deeper meaning: everyone knows Milley cares less for his role as head of state than for the part of augur of the “good news.” Mark Twain, who was very ironical and biting, used to say that “a prophet doesn’t need much brain; it’s a relaxed profession.” The Argentine leader has delegated the grey and exhausting national administration and also the shaping of politics, which bores him, to his sister and to the remnants of the Menem family; the numerous reforms to the explosive Federico Sturzenegger, and all the economic management to the trader Luis Caputo. Deprived of these tedious presidential tasks, Milei occupies himself with regulating freedom of expression through some fecal insults and with yielding to the strategic whims of the International Club of the Recalcitrant Reactionaries. Every week there’s a new foolishness, turned into official narrative, and this time he took advantage of the Brazilian results to make Milei into a miracle-worker of Latin American politics; Caputo wrote it without blush, praising his boss: “In two and a half years, he changed the way people vote across an entire continent.” Milei’s example spreads everywhere and his long arm works wonders: it seems that his latest visit to Brazil convinced the citizens of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro to vote for the right. Impressive. The prophet wields the alchemy that changes the colors of the region at will: his mere presence makes blue all that was red. Let us hope Donald Trump hasn’t read the tweet from the “best minister in history,” because we know the magnate is a sensitive man and could come to think that his merits are being snatched away. And the matter is not one to anger with the new mother country since it has become very clear — the minister himself noted this week — that the best program of the modest Western chronicle will fortunately count on a new American bailout if needed. The very Scott Bessent opened the door to the possibility of again carrying out a multimillion-dollar rescue for Argentina, and that reassured the crowd: it already seemed to us that those malicious conjectures suggesting that Trumpism would withhold money at the crucial moment and when nothing but the reelection of the great prophet of the south was at stake were mere speculation.
To put the matter plainly: the Argentinian economy is so agile and flourishing that it needs crutches all the time, and country risk does not fall because market sharks fail to understand that the growing discontent of the people is a fabrication and that, as a result, the opposition has no slightest chance of ending the anarcho-capitalist cycle. In internal circles, however, the high-end violets admit that this won’t be a stroll in the park and that the next eighteen months won’t be the best of our lives; also that consumption will not rise, that the drop in revenue is worrisome, and that investors don’t want to open their wallets until they see how this little tale ends. It is not known, with certainty, what degree of Bilardismo the libertarian prophet will show in this anxious hour, beyond the verbal juggling and the statistical camels that he parades and validates: with industry and construction, players celebrate a corner and a cross, and conceal a defeat that has been unfolding for months.
The insightful economic historian Pablo Gerchunoff wrote these days: “The most important lesson of Keynes was to change one’s mind when the era changes. Being a free trader or protectionist, fiscally contractionary or expansionary, depends on the times. Today we are overwhelmed by dogmatism with universal and timeless truths.” Another well-meaning theorist, researcher Alberto Ades, participated in a cabinet meeting and later wrote a reflection in which he lavishes praise on the government, but reveals that he is “exploring other alternatives,” and points to the core of the dilemma: how can the costs of this transition be moderated and give businesses a chance to adapt, “without compromising the fiscal balance or the disinflation objectives”? He asks independent economists to consider the constraints and make “an effort to contribute concrete and viable proposals.” He appeals to the generosity and patriotism of his colleagues, which does not fail to reveal a dramatic point, and he also hints at a key factor: “A rift that hinders consensus.” Those colleagues, every time they warned about dangers and errors, were hammered and treated as mandrills, and that pernicious rift was converted into an abyss by Milei himself, who bets everything on polarization and who has not flinched at firing ferociously — and mainly against those who accompanied him in dissent. Ades suggests, perhaps unintentionally, a self-critique of a certain liberal orthodoxy: you cannot apply a recipe to the letter without taking into account the mid-term disruptions, or justify them with pure Darwinism — then you must ask the victims of that massacre for their vote — and you cannot generate a perpetual policy in a democracy of extremes where the other is the apocalyptic enemy with whom it is impossible to discuss short-term measures and much less permanent state policies. There is no liberal democracy in a system of pendular hegemonies with forced alternations. The problem is that, in this world of spasmodic votes and TikTok ideologies, the key to winning elections lies in breaking bridges and managing negative sentiments. He who sows those winds can only reap during the government cruel temporary measures.
While the libertarian camp celebrated the triumph of the Bolsonaro clan, which once again exploited that formula of discord —the civil war of the spirits— and confirmed its apparent tactical infallibility, an act of strong symbolic value unfolded in Buenos Aires that can be read as the reverse side of the coin: the moment when Soledad Pastorutti sang a popular song to Lionel Messi as a farewell. In that song, reference was made to the professional circuit of the national team captain, but it also resonated with every listener: “So many fires I started, so many failures I tested, I don’t know how I still manage to sing; so many beatings I dodged, so many betrayals I bought, so many quarrels made me bare my teeth.” Millions of Argentines who live each day in mutual hostility for various reasons were galvanized by two people whom neither the rift nor the rancor could penetrate or corrupt. It was a strange ceremony of positive feelings, which for a moment reminded us all of who we were before the paroxysm of the trenches. The song is still hummed, and it sits in the collective unconscious. Fewer people than we think want to live in this state of eternal discord; perhaps only a fierce minority that is both victim and victimizer in this self-destructive spiral. That moment of positive feelings may be anecdotal or prophetic. We would need a soul-and-people auscultator, a true prophet who would resolve that fundamental enigma and announce the future.
——————