Javier Milei was sworn in as president of Argentina on December 10, 2023.

Usually described as an anarcho-capitalist, his extreme neo-liberalist ideology has won praise from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) but promises intense suffering for the 40 per cent of Argentine people living in poverty.

Upon assuming office, Milei abolished nine of the 18 government ministries. He is promising to stop new infrastructure projects, lay off recently employed government workers, cut transport and energy subsidies, and reduce payments to provinces.

All this is supposed to cut Argentina’s $44 billion foreign debt.

Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the IMF, posted on X / Twitter on December 18 that Milei’s austerity policies are “an important step toward restoring stability and rebuilding the country’s economic potential.”

It is difficult to see “stability and rebuilding” in Argentina’s future.

Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, holds a minority of parliamentary seats, and Milei’s ability to compromise and form a stable consensus is questionable. For most of the last decade, Milei was regarded as an eccentric joker who would appear in television discussions wearing weird costumes and mouthing extreme anti-state ideas.

And yet he won the election with about 56% of the vote.

Milei is part of the same phenomenon that has raised to national leadership irrationalist, eccentric, and right-wing extremists such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orbán.

Argentine politics has long been plagued by a confusing mess of left and right extremism that has often shaded from one to the other.

Juan Perón, who ruled as president from 1946 to 1955, was wildly popular with the working class because he created jobs through public works programs and fostered industry behind a wall of protectionism. At the same time, he repressed dissidents and gave sanctuary to Nazis fleeing justice.

Perón was overthrown by a military coup but was re-elected as president in 1973 during a period of working-class upsurge. It was Perón’s Minister of Social Welfare, José López Rega, who formed the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance death squad, which was a spearhead of the infamous “dirty war” against the left.

The Perónista Justicialist Party remains a significant Congressional party and has substantial weight in the Argentine trade union movement.

It is an understatement to say that the Justicialists and their union bureaucrats have been mired in class collaboration. Additionally, there are a range of other parties claiming to represent the heritage of Perónism, shading from far-left to centre-left.

It has been the failure of Perónism to lead Argentina out of its persistent hyper-inflation and generalised capitalist crisis that paved the way for Milei.

Here, life-long Latin American political activist Gregorio Salles engages with the chaos that followed Milei’s election in Argentina.

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The working class in Argentina did not vote consciously for the “extreme right” as it is still repeated by some left-wing groups. A massive section of voters looked past Milei’s political program and voted for an image.

They voted for the different, the small-great man, the one that does not surrender, that challenger, that winds up for a punch, the one that drives, that blocks and does not negotiate.

Milei is the one who is not there to mediate conflict; he presents himself as the personification of conflict.

As happened with Bolsonaro’s political platform in Brazil, Milei proposes breaking from an institutional paradigm in the direction of something like a conservative revolution. It is revolutionary in its proposal, but not in essence.

The seductive strategy of these anarchic platforms is to suggest that the State is corruption itself.

They are platforms managed and sponsored by the local financial bourgeoise, and its main actors must act as a representative of those entrepreneurs, hungry for business deals and cost reductions. These key words are always on the agenda.

Milei, Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, Giorgia Meloni and company have much in common. They are pseudo-heroic-mythic figures, highly disposable for the ones controlling them.

They align even in their vocabulary, fulfilling their populist role, always positioning themselves as ‘outsiders’, in an anti-system program. They intelligently hijack the working class’s tiredness and its imaginary of needs and dissatisfaction. They play with affects, religiosity and with the basic needs of the working class and achieve positive results for their project.

Meanwhile, the neoliberal conciliatory left – an aberration that took over the left worldwide – remains silent. It does not bring an alternative proposal forward, nor real class struggle.

Milei brings exactly the opposite, “conciliation is corruption, I am not here to negotiate!” he yells.

The working class cannot stand anymore the conditions imposed by the exploitative capitalist system. But power does not leave empty space.

In a political vacuum, there comes either a revolutionary proposal from the left, or the extreme right perfects its ability to hijack and activate all the working class’s distresses, to then format its political platforms with intelligence, good communication with its own style and in “revolutionary” doses.

That is what happened in Nazi Germany. It is what happened in Brazil some years ago during Bolsonaro’s presidency, and some decades ago during the military coup.

This is what happened all over the world at some point with the insurgency of fascism and its twin brother, neoliberalism. They dominate the status quo, the means of production, the armed forces, the media, and the bourgeoise sponsors them all without reserves.

Most likely, we will see in the next chapters a domesticated Milei, a more pacified discourse in the neoliberal space, so the Argentinian capitalist system can try to at least keep running.

The silly chat about not negotiating with China, Brazil, and with other international players will dwindle. Instead, space will be given to the growth of capital accumulation by the Argentinian ruling elite, bringing even more suffering to the country’s working class.

It has already been happening in the last few weeks, revealing a more contained Milei and proving the electoral strategy of those controlling the political platform that carries his name.

This toxic mixture is what is left for the progressively more acute class struggle among the Global South countries, continually squeezed by imperialism and with the basis for the defence of its sovereignty weakened.

Maybe this ruling-class distraction from its chronic and unresolvable crisis can give space to a positive dynamic, with the increasing birth (or would it be rebirth?) of true revolutionary groups, with social and proletarian ties. This would be a circumstance where socialising the economy and the essential means of production becomes an unavoidable reality.

How many more losses will we have to witness before we try to glue together the pieces of a lethargic international left aligned with neoliberalism that tries to survive by holding to a kind of chronic legalism? Can this aberration even be called the left? How can it lay claim to the name ‘the left’?

Certainly, the people in nations that found emancipation through continuing struggle, sweat and blood in their popular revolutions lead by the revolutionary left would not recognise that claim.

Gregório (Greg) Salles is a social activist, musician, educator and an awarded political strategist.

He has started many digital platforms for social movements in Brazil, like electorate strike 2014, the app MediPreco.  He leads a startup Restart Us that delivers free tools to workers in the informal economy.