After the failure of his omnibus law in Congress, at odds with governors and with his popularity and credibility on the wane, far-right President Javier Milei would meet with former President Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) to discuss the formal incorporation of the right-wing Republican Proposal (PRO) into the government, in an experiment of libertarian-neoliberal co-governance.
By Aram Aharonian
“There will be no co-government here, I am the one in charge,” said Milei, who fears that the rapprochement with Macri implies a double command. The same fear led him to reject an agreement in December, encouraged by his security minister, Patricia Bullrich, who is also president of PRO. Milei understands that there can be no doubt that his government is not a second Macri term and that he is the one who makes the decisions. He has not asked me for anything,” he asserts.
The announcement has raised doubts within each of his domestic parties as to how it will be carried out and what its implications will be. So far, the PRO has two ministers for defense and security, and the press reports that it wants three more. In any case, Milei is surrounded by Economy Minister Luis Caputo and senior advisor Federico Sturzenegger (Finance Minister and former President of the Central Bank with Macri, respectively).
Concerned, Paraguay’s right-wing President Santiago Peña advised Milei to seek a “political consensus” to improve government management, warning that “without the support of the political class represented in parliament, it will be very difficult”.
In a little less than 60 days, the government has implemented a 100% devaluation, with increases in fuel, food, tariffs, and salary cuts; it has accelerated the defunding of public budgets and left the national universities in danger of not being able to start classes.
It presented a Decree of Necessity and Urgency (DNU) with more than 300 articles, which includes a regressive labor reform that opens the possibility of a regime of exception overriding Congress, as well as the privatization of public companies and the unlimited auctioning of land and natural resources to national and foreign “vultures”, such as Elon Musk, to whom the president seems to have promised lithium.
Along with this decree, the government sent to Congress an omnibus law, a package of laws written as if they were one, which implies structural changes in the political and economic regime, restricts the right to protest and grants extraordinary powers to the executive.
Former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner defined Milei as “a showman-economist” and noted that, despite his campaign rhetoric, “once elected, he produced an unusual recycling of characters and former officials”, referring mainly to the head of the economy, Luis Caputo – “the architect of the serial indebtedness of Mauricio Macri’s government and the return of the IMF to Argentina” – and Federico Sturzenegger.
She added that “it is more than obvious that in the president’s mind, the only stabilization plan is dollarisation”, after questioning the “planned chaos” generated by the “savage adjustment program that acts as a real destabilization plan”.
The former president warned of “the climate of insults, attacks, disqualifications, and stigmatization that has increased exponentially since the return of the omnibus bill to a committee”, which “presages a scenario of violence that, as we already know, begins verbally and then becomes physical”.
For his part, the academic and economist Horacio Rovelli stressed the sell-out spirit of the omnibus bill and how it was an attack on national sovereignty: the investment fund “Blackrock is our main private creditor, with more than two billion dollars in bonds”.
He pointed out that Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, had asked for Milei for the state-owned Yacimiento Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF), Banco Nación and the Vaca Muerta oil fields. “They have money to invest and they believe that we are an African colony, that because of the debt, we are going to sell our heritage and our natural beauty, that is why they are pushing the Glaciers Law and the Forestry Law,” he stresses.
For Rovelli, “Javier Milei is not a balanced person. His only hope is that the Legislative Assembly will remove him from office.
Visit to the Pope
After learning of the parliamentary failure, Milei met with Pope Francis at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. “I’m a Catholic, but I practice part of the Jewish religion,” he said, unafraid, in a program on the Italian channel Rettequatro.
By embracing the Jesuit Jorge Bergoglio, Milei wanted to leave behind the gratuitous aggressions he had made during the campaign against the highest authority of the Catholic Church, including that of “the representative of evil on earth”. Now, he says, he has “reconsidered his opinion of the Pope”, who has become for him “the most important person in the whole of Argentina”.
But it was also “business” for the Pope, who channeled the relationship and tried to focus on the urgent social agenda. Milei said he had to “reconsider some thoughts because the Pope is the head of Catholics all over the world”. But he did not raise this as a revision of the previous denunciation, although several men close to him are also Jesuits (although others among Catholics are Opus Dei). Has Bergoglio “blessed” the government with Macri?
Education as a business
The Mileinista project does not propose a defined function for the education system. Already in his election campaign, he declared that compulsory education should be abolished: this is the idea that many ultra-liberal economists and the Austrian school proclaim as dogma.
Former education minister Daniel Filmus points out that this concept does not envisage education playing an important role in training for work, productivity, or scientific and technological development, because the proposed model does not include an expansion of the labor market, a process of industrialization or the creation of one’s knowledge and technologies.
The anarcho-capitalists argue that society should not invest in the training of workers or professionals where it is not known whether they will find a job to continue their career, since this would imply “over-education” in a society that is designed to be divided between employers/employers and uneducated and untrained workers, who are easier to exploit.
It is a model for the construction of an ideological hegemony that does away with the role of schools and concentrates mainly on social networks. An economic adjustment policy that will drastically reduce investment in education, science, and technology and will hit teachers’ salaries hard, deepening inequality and conditioning the possibility of starting and continuing the school year and the quality of schooling, adds Filmus.
For them, education is a public expense for which there is no return to justify the social investment. It is therefore a risky investment that should be borne by the individual.
For them, the few highly skilled jobs that an increasingly concentrated economy will require can be filled by the elite or high-quality educational circuits of the private education sector or foreign institutions.
Dollarisation?
While the social agenda is undergoing adjustment, economic contraction, and soaring inflation, Javier Milei’s plan to dollarize the economy is moving forward, supposedly in a very short time, encouraged by businessmen and influential people in power who believe that the only way for the government to control prices is to wipe out the peso and replace it with the US currency.
Dollarisation is eagerly awaited by the mafias and criminal sectors: it will replicate in Argentina the criminal business of the Salvadoran maras, marginalization, and drug trafficking throughout the continent, to the benefit of the big banks of the capitalist system.
But the dollarisation fears that the Supreme Court of Justice will kill the idea. Its president, Horacio Rosatti, pointed out that “if dollarisation eliminates the Argentine currency, it is unconstitutional” – “it would be a currency that could not be issued by the national state (…) and because it would be a currency whose value could not be fixed by the national state” – and urged politicians to “read the constitution”.
Bonapartism?
Some (foreign) analysts have been bold enough to describe the Mileinato as a Bonapartist government, albeit a weak one, given that the government’s parliamentary representation is small for such ambitious goals, and the governorship is not in the hands of its political force. (Bonapartism is inspired by the policies of the French emperor Napoleon I).
Moreover, there is a balance of forces between the classes that need to be broken, and there are important cracks in the bourgeoisie itself. As a class, they agree on the need for a “hard or shock adjustment” (devaluation, increased extractivist, labor reform, cuts in pensions, welfare, public employment, and state spending in general) but each faction wants the adjustment to be paid for by someone else.
Finance capital and its institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, are the main supporters and beneficiaries of the profound changes that the government intends to carry out to satisfy, first and foremost, the foreign creditors. The same capitalist sector is also aware of the blow that the measures represent not only for the popular majorities but also for the interests of other capitalist groups, partly represented by the governors.
This was evident in the treatment of the Omnibus Law in the Chamber of Deputies, where the export bosses of agriculture and industry managed to eliminate the increase in withholding taxes and then to protect other sectors of the economy from the opening up of imports (such as sugar, citrus fruits, etc.), as Fredy Lizarrague points out.
The strict application of the anti-picketing protocol seemed to jeopardize the approval of the Omnibus Law. The Ministry of Security was told that having too many troops on the streets could be counterproductive, especially if Bullrich gave the order to react at the first sign of non-compliance with the protocol.
Time for convulsions?
But Milei is happy with Patricia Bullrich’s performance and her mission to order public space, especially when the forces are provoked or challenged by protesters. But resistance to police repression, albeit a minority, has put regime analysts on alert.
The foreseeable stage that opens up after the first acts of Milei’s government – to which should be added the co-government with Macrismo, if it happens – is one of social upheaval. Milei is confronted with reality after his electoral offers begin to show more propaganda than real weight, pushing half the population into poverty, using food and the food crisis as an adjustment variable.
The doubt is about the massiveness of the struggle, in the face of the intimidation of the scare campaign of the hegemonic media and the excessive repression in the streets, when the main force of the opposition, Peronism, still seems to be asleep after the electoral defeat, caused mainly by the disorder provoked by the bad government of Alberto Fernandez.
The left today is the street, where workers, educators, the unemployed, and social and neighborhood movements add their rejection of the government’s measures and orientations, defying the deadly repressive apparatus of Milei and Bullrich.
