Opinion | Argentina's Javier Milei shows where angry polarization leads

Years ago, as the United States was beginning its descent into political and social polarization, a friend who, like me, had emigrated from well-polarized Argentina, suggested we might be able to lend advice to our new compatriots, pointing out with sarcastic pride: “We come from the future.”

Today in Argentina, that future has given rise to Javier Milei, a far-right politician who, this past Sunday, won the country’s mandatory cross-party primaries by pledging to get rid of the entire political class, dollarize the economy, abolish the central bank, dismantle any remnant of a welfare state and arm citizens. A self-defined libertarian, Milei doesn’t shy away from legalizing the sale and purchase of human organs. Yet he is also a social conservative seeking to ban abortion, crack down on crime and forbid the use of inclusive language.

Above all, he represents what’s left after polarization exhausts itself without offering any real solutions: pure anger.

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Amid an annual inflation rate of 115 percent, a three-year drought that has cost the country $20 billion, an almost insurmountable $44 billion debt with the International Monetary Fund and around 43 percent of Argentines grappling with poverty, Milei has coalesced that anger against what he has dubbed “the caste” — leaders hailing from both the ruling Peronist movement and its primary opposition, Juntos por el Cambio.

These two factions have dominated and divided Argentine political life for the past two decades, but their roots can be traced back as far as the 1940s, to the rise of Juan and Eva Perón, who founded the political movement today known as Peronism. A force for justice that created the Argentine welfare state, legalized labor unions and gave women the right to vote, Peronism was also a cult of personality that drew comparisons to Italian fascism under Benito Mussolini. Its long, unbeatable electoral record catalyzed a rabid opposition whose only way to power was through military coups and suppression of the political majority.

When the last military dictatorship concluded in 1983, it was replaced by a more or less mutually tolerant bipartisan system. But this collapsed in December 2001 after Argentina defaulted on its debt and nearly half the country sank into poverty. That month, five presidents succeeded one another over the span of about two weeks, with angry crowds marching in the streets shouting, “Get rid of them all!”

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A new Peronist president, Néstor Kirchner, came to power in 2003, inaugurating a prosperous era driven by the skyrocketing price of soy, Argentina’s main export. However, when, in 2007, at the peak of his popularity, he chose his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, to succeed him, the enmity of the previous century returned with a vengeance. The ghosts of Juan and Eva Perón reemerged, and the mutual loathing between “Kirchnerists” and “anti-Kirchnerists” engulfed political and social life.

Politics and government became less and less an agora to find solutions and more and more vicious battlegrounds where combatants’ primary goal was to beat the enemy and watch it squirm. Vigilant partisans kept their sides pure by enforcing the “correct” line, with no room for nuance or compromise.

In the meantime, the price of commodities slumped. Financial straits caused Fernández de Kirchner’s defeat in 2015 and the ballooning of debt during the term of her successor, Mauricio Macri. The IMF bailed out the anti-Kirchnerist Macri with a $57 billion loan, the largest in its history (which his opponent and successor Alberto Fernández negotiated down to $44 billion). With the hardships of the coronavirus pandemic compounded by a three-year drought and the complications of the war in Ukraine, Argentina sank into a spiraling crisis.

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Macri’s Juntos por el Cambio had been expected to come back to power in elections scheduled for this October. It entered the primaries with two candidates: hard-right Patricia Bullrich and the moderate mayor of Buenos Aires, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. Meanwhile, the Peronists offered up centrist Sergio Massa, Fernandez de Kirchner’s minister of the economy.

Beating them all was Milei, a mistreated child whose only known affections are his sister and five English mastiffs. An economist by trade, he has managed to articulate the deep rage welling up within the country. His tirades against politicians from both sides resonate with a large portion of the electorate. Popular anger explains his rise better than either his controversial proposals or his peculiar personality. (He doesn’t deny communicating spiritually with his dead dog to ask it for political advice.) On Sunday night, his followers were shouting, “Get rid of them all!” as though it were 2001.

Does this mean Milei will be the next Argentine president? It’s far from certain. He did not win in either of the two largest electoral districts — the city and the province of Buenos Aires — where 44 percent of the vote is.

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In any case, Milei’s emergence signals a large part of the country’s exhaustion and exasperation with a polarized era that brought only collective failure — the grim future my friend and I thought we had escaped by immigrating to the United States.

Had we? Polarization is like a drug: After experimentation comes continued use, then a rising tolerance. The rules of caution are broken, and the unthinkable becomes possible. That was Jan. 6, 2021, in the United States: a failed insurrection instigated by a defeated president refusing to leave office. American democracy, with all its accomplishments and failings, was to be discarded into the bin of history to reject those people’s victory — as it was in Argentina over the past century.

Polarization wraps both sides in its embrace. To President Biden’s credit, during his very early days, he offered bipartisanship to Congress, and his own version of a New Deal to those who had voted against him. Neither worked out. Bipartisanship died the day Republicans refused to impeach Donald Trump for his role in the haphazard, botched coup d’état that culminated on Jan. 6. And Biden’s New Deal did not survive the divisions within his own party.

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Those failures left Biden only one strategy: more polarization. Last year, Democrats survived the midterm elections by boosting the more extreme GOP candidates, which rallied the Democratic base and divided the Republicans. In 2024, once again, defeating Trump will be Biden’s principal mission and purpose. Polarization remains the path of least resistance. In drug terms, that’s dependence.

Is the United States approaching an Argentine future? It’s closer, I’d say. But there remains a slight chance for the two sides to acknowledge their addiction, mend bridges and find a better way forward. If they can’t, all that will be left is the anger.

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