William Callison in Sidecar:
Having led his libertarian party alliance La Libertad Avanza into Congress in 2021, the far-right Argentine politician Javier Milei has once again outperformed expectations. In the August presidential primaries he received 30% of the vote – beating the two candidates from the centre-left Unidad Ciudadana, who won only 27% between them, and those from the centre-right Juntos por el Cambio, who came away with 28%. Now, in the run up to the general election of 22 October, Milei sits alone atop every poll. The only uncertainty is whether he can break the threshold to avoid a second round.
For many onlookers, Milei’s politics have been difficult to classify. He is a former semi-professional footballer, rock musician, comic-con cosplayer, tantric sex guru and professor of economics. He is also a red-faced television pundit and self-made internet meme. Caricature of this admittedly cartoonish figure is the crutch of countless op-eds, which reduce him to a Trump knock-off with an even more eccentric hairstyle (his nickname is ‘The Wig’). Others view Milei as another iteration of Latin America’s amorphous ‘populist’ phenomenon. As an article in Foreign Affairs put it, the region’s socioeconomic volatility has a tendency to produce ‘radical iconoclasts’: ‘Milei, Castillo, Bolsonaro, Chávez, and Bukele would probably not have risen in a more stable setting.’ In this binary frame – liberal stability versus populist demagoguery – all variants of ‘anti-establishment’ politics are lumped together, with little sense of their local particularities.
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