When Javier Milei, the surprising winner of the presidential primaries and favorite in the first round this Sunday, talks about Argentine democracy that is turning 40 years old, several alarm signals go off.
“We have probably passed the desert of 40 years to regain freedom“, he declared on Wednesday at his closing campaign event. Was there no freedom during the longest democratic period in a century? Or was there freedom between 1976 and 1983, when the country was ruled by a military dictatorship? Or between 1973 and 1976, when the Peronist ultra-left and ultra-right began the bloodbath that multiplied during the dictatorship?
Milei does not answer those questions because in recent weeks he disappeared from the media that, fascinated by the audience levels he generated, elevated him in recent years and gave food to social networks that transformed him into a popular phenomenon. And he doesn’t respond, either, because in her interviews he sets prior limits: I’m not going to talk about this. And if not, there is no interview.
Will Milei sit down on December 10 in the main office of the Casa Rosada to lead a G-20 country? And if it happens, is Argentine democracy in danger?
That is going too far, although Jesús Rodríguez, former minister, former parliamentarian and today at the head of the General Auditor’s Office of the Nation, marks a deterioration. “The combination of populism and ideological necrophilia contributes to understanding that people vote for anything”, explains Rodríguez to EL MUNDO. “There is a questioning of certain issues that we believed were internalized forever. Just as the international order that we knew is in doubt, the institutional infrastructure of the West is also being questioned.”