Argentina’s President-elect Javier Milei delivered a rousing victory speech on Sunday night, interrupted by chants of “liberty!” and campaign songs calling for the ouster of all politicians, promising to “embrace the ideas of liberty” and restore Argentina to world-power status within 35 years.
Milei won the nation’s chief executive office in a landslide vote, defeating socialist opponent Sergio Massa, the nation’s current minister of economics, by about 12 percentage points. Massa had won the first round of voting in October, when Milei – a solidly right-wing economic populist – had to compete for the vote with an establishment conservative candidate, Patricia Bullrich. As no candidate in that election received enough support to win the presidency outright, the top two vote-getters – Massa and Milei – went on to Sunday’s runoff vote, leaving Bullrich out of the election.
Bullrich and the leader of her coalition, former Argentine President Mauricio Macri, enthusiastically endorsed Milei after the first round of voting. Milei, in turn, thanked them for what he called a “historic” move in embracing his movement.
Javier Milei is an economist by trade who rose to prominence in the country offering economic analysis on cable news. He founded his political party, Liberty Advances, in 2021, and became a lawmaker in a shocking election that year that saw the socialist Peronist ruling party coalition lose the majority in Congress for the first time since 1983. He identifies as libertarian – “liberal” in Latin America – staunching anti-socialist, anti-communist, and small-government. He has promised to end the Argentine Central Bank, install the U.S. dollar as an official currency, and distance Argentina from rogue communist states such as China, contrary to the foreign policy of the string of leftist leaders who will precede him when he takes office on December 10.