| New in Telos Insights
by Javier Burdman
Populist politics aims not only at implementing a policy agenda, but also at transforming political culture at large. Javier Milei is certainly a populist in this regard. Like previous leaders of this kind in Argentine history, such as Hipólito Yrigoyen in the 1910s and Juan Perón in the 1940s, Milei wants to fundamentally change Argentina. But unlike his predecessors, he wants to do it from the right. Will he succeed? Based on recent history in Argentine politics, it seems unlikely that Milei will achieve his stated goals of lasting macroeconomic stability and dramatic reduction of the public sector. However, his best shot at producing a lasting social transformation consists in preserving the ambivalence of his ideological orientation. In this regard, he is no different from previous populist leaders, though his right-wing vision certainly is.
In order to understand the nature of Milei’s innovation, we have to consider the unusual ideological alignments of Argentine politics. Instead of divisions along the left-right spectrum characteristic of most countries, Argentina has typically had a populist and a non- (and often anti-) populist pole. The populist pole, which since the 1940s mostly coincided with Peronism, was ideologically oriented to political and economic pragmatism, strong leadership, and mass mobilization. The non-populist pole was ideologically oriented to rule-based politics and economics, respect for political institutions, and more procedural forms of political participation. Both poles contained left- and right-wing tendencies, which often led to unexpected shifts in ideological positions within one and the other. Peronism had been mostly associated with economic redistribution in favor of the working class since the 1940s, then it became the party of neoliberal reforms in the 1990s with Carlos Menem, and finally it shifted to a clear left-wing economic and social agenda in the 2000s and 2010s with Néstor and Cristina Kirchner.
Until the 2010s, right-wing ideologies had no clear place in the political field in Argentina. Generally and comparatively speaking, Argentines tend to agree with the idea of a strong public sector that actively fosters economic redistribution, and no major political party had put market-based economics at the core of its agenda. In the 1990s, after campaigning strongly on redistributionist ideas, Peronist president Carlos Menem unexpectedly turned to neoliberal economic reforms in an attempt, which proved successful in the short run, to end hyperinflation and achieve macroeconomic stability. However, this ideological shift turned out to be temporary, as Peronism switched back to State-centered redistributionist policies in the 2000s. During those years, business owner Mauricio Macri founded a new center-right political party, Propuesta Republicana, which grew from the City of Buenos Aires to the rest of the country until winning the presidential elections in 2015. Although decidedly pro-market, Propuesta Republicana presented itself as a moderate political force, with an agenda of efficient management (as opposed to drastic reduction) of the State, fighting against corruption and respect for institutional procedures.
Against this background, Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, is the first decidedly, unapologetic major right-wing political party in modern Argentine history. As his supporters often point out, 2023 represents the first presidential election in Argentina in which a candidate wins with an explicit agenda of gutting the public sector. Milei and his followers interpret this as a cultural transformation: for the first time, the right has an opportunity to implement the radical economic reforms required to achieve long-term macroeconomic stability not against the will of the majority of voters but rather backed by it. If they are successful in drastically reducing the public sector and dismantling the welfare state, they believe, this cultural transformation will become permanent, as more and more people will need to adapt to the rules of a market economy. Thus, Milei’s followers often describe their project as a “cultural battle”—a term that, ironically, is associated with the work of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and which was also popular during Kirchnerism. They believe that there is a unique ideological context that makes possible a radical economic transformation, which will in turn reinforce the cultural change and make it permanent. Like previous populist projects, Milei’s economic agenda is linked to a larger transformation of society, without which this agenda cannot hold.
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