Making politics with a chainsaw: This could describe the policy of Argentina’s new president, Milei. After decades of social democratic mismanagement, he aims to get Argentina back on track with a ‘shock therapy’ reminiscent of Pinochet, by exceeding the demands of Western institutions like the IMF through libertarian measures. The national currency, the peso, is to be abolished and replaced with the dollar. Massive social cuts are planned to help manage the national debt. In short, ordinary Argentinians are expected to pull the cart out of the mud, and now they are even allowed to sell their own organs.

Although the president, who converted to Judaism, opposes abortion, he simultaneously welcomes a debate on the right to sell one’s children. The endgame of ‘anarcho-capitalism’ is thus the exploitation of human bodies for the free market and a clear path for wealthy paedophiles. In a word: ‘predatory capitalism’. In foreign policy, relations with trading partners like Russia, China, and Brazil are to be largely severed. Instead, Argentina should align with the West, including support for wars in Ukraine and Palestine — he says no to a sovereign Latin America in a multipolar world.

The question undoubtedly remains whether he will succeed with his measures: Argentine judges have already scrapped individual social reforms, mass protests accompany his social cuts, and Milei has not further damaged relations with China, the second-largest creditor, beyond the cancelled entry into the BRICS nations. Javier Milei is no messiah — rather, he seems like a Frodo Baggins who, at the end of The Lord of the Rings, keeps the One Ring of Power for himself instead of throwing it into the volcano. Under him, Argentina is on the path to becoming a US stock exchange colony, precisely invoking the spectres of bone-crushing communism that Milei claims to fight.

(translated by Constantin von Hoffmeister)