Milei’s party scores a decisive victory in Argentina
Milei wasn’t running; he’s not up for re-election until 2027. This was a midterm election in which polls said his party wasn’t doing well. But it seems the polls were wrong
Fancy that.
And Trump apparently had a role in all of this:
Basically, no one believed that Millei’s reforms would stick. People did not want to invest in Argentina’s economy because they were pretty sure another leftist would just defeat him at the next elections and return the country to basket-case socialist rule.
The only way to get people to invest would be to convince them that Millei was popular and that he’d be around to make sure the reforms stuck. But people didn’t believe this, and the Argentinian peso continued to decline in value.
This is when Trump intervened. He declared the US dollar would trade at a fixed rate against the Argentinian peso, thus effectively setting a floor for the peso’s value. He also spent billions of America dollars buying up the Argentinian peso, buttressing its value.
But that’s not all he did. Trump declared that America’s support for the Argentinan peso was conditioned absolutely on the Argentines voting in favor of Milei’s party at the mid-terms. If the public turned on Milei, Trump would end all support for the country.
He said that if the Argentines chose basket-case socialism again, America would bail out of bailing out Argentina, as Argentina would just be a “waste of our time.”
Milei’s victory was dramatic, although – this being a parliamentary election – his party didn’t reach 50%:
Milei, a key ideological ally of President Trump, said his party and allied blocs picked up 14 seats in the Senate and 64 in the lower house of Congress on Sunday, three seats short of a congressional majority.
“I am the king of a lost world,” Milei exulted as his supporters cheered in downtown Buenos Aires on Sunday. “Today we have passed the turning point. Today we begin the construction of a great Argentina.”
No kings? Ah, well. Make Argentina Great Again. Argentina has been an economic basket case for long enough that the voters decided to take a chance on Milei. He’s had some successes although it hasn’t been smooth sailing:
Milei had spent his first two years in office with a minority in Argentina’s Congress. With his party’s victory on Sunday, he will have more breathing room to carry out his shock therapy agenda with less fear of legislators overriding his vetoes.
Under the new government’s watch, monthly inflation plunged from 12.8% prior to Milei’s inauguration in December 2023 to 2.1% in September of this year.
One thing that especially interests me is the poor predictive value of the polling. As Trump said:
NOTE: I’ve written previously quite a few times about Milei; see these posts.
Making South America Great may be part of the new Monroe doctrine. Make this hemisphere free and prosperous and keep the cancer of socialism out. Argentina is a good start.
The November 2023 inflation rate of 12.8% is correctly stated. However, Melei did not take office until December 10, 2023, which leads me to conclude that the December 2023 inflation rate—25.5%— should be used as the baseline for Melei’s record in reducing inflation.
Argentina Inflation Rate MoM
Kate
The recent Presidential election in Bolivia is also an indication of the movement away from Socialism (No mas, MAS). The leftist party of Evo Morales got only several seats in the legislative elections–after having run the country since 2006. Evo’s candidate finished a poor third in the preliminary election–about 12%. The runoff election featured, in effect a Ted Cruz conservative type—coincidentally a Texas A&M grad—and a RINO/centrist candidate. The Ted Cruz type won the traditionally conservative/free market areas–Santa Cruz and Tarija. The Rino/centrist candidate won the election by taking the areas that had previously voted for Evo (Evo: think Bernie Sanders or AOC).
Wow. A US currency intervention? I certainly missed that one.
From your lips to God’s ears Kate.
The purpose of modern polling is not to gauge sentiment, but to steer it, manipulate it into the desired outcome. The term is not descriptive, it’s used to hide the purpose from the subject population.
From the excerpt: “Trump declared that America’s support for the Argentinan peso was conditioned absolutely on the Argentines voting in favor of Milei’s party at the mid-terms. If the public turned on Milei, Trump would end all support for the country.”
This is a foreign policy I can get behind 100%.
If you want America’s money, you have to earn it.
Doesn’t mean that Argentina won’t go back to socialism in a heartbeat if the Democrats regain control in the USA, but maybe by then they will have become an “electorate that learned.”