This Sunday, Argentina will host a general election with far-right extremist Javier Milei leading in the polls for its presidency.
Javier Milei is a professor, federal deputy, and the leader of political party La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances).
Milei is a self-described “anarcho-capitalist”, calling to dismantle the Argentine state and eliminate ministries such as Education, Labour, and Health.
“The state is the enemy,” he has said. “If I had to choose between the State and the mafia, I would choose the mafia.”
40 years ago — following seven years of killings, disappearances, and systematic human rights violations by the US-backed military junta — Argentina won its democracy.
Now, Milei wants to rewrite the nation’s history to negate this legacy of state violence. Milei has viciously attacked the Grandmothers and Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, who have dedicated their lives to the search for their loved ones. Meanwhile, his running mate Victoria Villarruel has defended prisoners convicted of genocide. “I hate communists, shitty left-wingers” Milei has said.
Yet the international community has failed to register the threat of Argentina’s extreme right — to the nation of Argentina, to the region of Latin America, and to the prospects for democracy worldwide.
Milei and La Libertad Avanza openly aligns itself with the reactionary forces such as Spain’s VOX, France’s National Rally, and the Brothers of Italy. “My alignment with Trump and Bolsonaro is almost natural,” Milei has said. His campaign should and must be a rallying cry for all democratic forces that witnessed the dangers of this new alignment.
Argentina is suffering. Ex-president Mauricio Macri’s illegal IMF agreement saddled the Argentina economy with an unbearable weight of sovereign debt, immiserating poor and working people across the country.
Javier Milei hopes to capitalize on this misery with a vision of exclusion, division, and draconian cuts that promise to send millions more Argentine citizens into poverty. The IMF agreement, in Milei’s words, is “tiny compared to the austerity package I am proposing.”
That is why the Progressive International has dispatched a high-level international delegation to Buenos Aires: to accompany the electoral process; to strengthen ties with trade unions, social movements, and parliamentary representatives on the frontlines of Argentine democracy; and to unite, organize, and mobilize progressive forces around the world to stand with them.
