Milei as the Argentine Messiah After the Failure of the Intellectuals

JULY 12, 2024

BY ARTURO DESIMONE

Argentine culture has often tended towards messianism. Diego Maradona was the Messiah, as is Messi. Argentinean poor youth in a stratified and enormous country, saw in Maradona somebody like them, who rose from the shantytown to becoming a multimillionaire, part of the jet-set, and a leading global opinion-maker. That’s why they called him El Barrilete Cósmico, “The Cosmic Kite.” He isPerón and he is Christ.

Javier Milei is similarly messianic. Milei’s voters see him not as a politician—more like an anti-political alien usurping the starship of the political class: a successful infiltrator who hacks the machine. To his fanbase, he is a folk-hero: an apocalyptic elf who appears after the total breakdown of the political system, filling the vacuum of post-politics. But who carved out the vacuum in Argentine sociopolitical life in the first place?

Hunger is on the rise in Argentina, and so is Milei. All else stagnates. Last week he got his very first piece of legislation through congress, after seven months in office. Many working-class voters, as well as lower middle-class Argentines watching their savings unravel, remain credulous that the performative politician’s shock-therapy will deliver. In May, Milei, shunned by the director of the Argentinean international bookfair, got even by filling Buenos Aires’ Luna Park stadium with a sold-out book presentation. Luna Park is not without notoriety: formerly the coliseum for sinister performances of the Peronist populist right—events where prominent European Nazis were also invited.

Wearing a trench-coat on-stage, Milei played rock guitar, then delivered an entertaining speech in which he invoked hilarious-sounding names of obscure Austrian economists—Ludwig after Ludwig, names unpronounceable to the average Argentine, evoking images of Germanic men wearing big wigs and cravats, staring wildly and ranting esoteric abstractions. What Maradona symbolized for slum youth, is what Milei represents to lower middle class café intellectuals—who form no small part of the population in Argentina, and who tired of seeing their incomes and hopes depleted under the two previous administrations which were supposed to differ radically from one another.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/07/12/milei-as-the-argentine-messiah-after-the-failure-of-the-intellectuals/