Milei Boosts His Reforms, Supported by the Ballot Box

Javier Milei feels strong. On March 18, his party, La Libertad Avanza, won the council elections in Buenos Aires. The Argentine president, who had turned this minor day into a referendum on his national management, felt supported and accelerated his agenda. For three weeks, he radicalized his speech, insulted his detractors with more vigor, and advanced reforms he had previously set aside.

Days after those elections, Milei limited the right to strike by decree, proclaimed the political death of his main ally—former president Mauricio Macri—proposed the end of legal abortion established in 2020, and advanced the dismantling of 40 years of Human Rights policies. Milei did not hold back. He also defended the use of fake news—above all, he said, “freedom of expression”—attacked an autistic child who dared to criticize him, and even got into a petty dispute with actor Ricardo Darín over the price of empanadas. With this momentum, Milei will participate this Sunday in Spain in “an economic and business event” funded by a cryptocurrency platform. This is part of a tour that will also take him to Italy, France, and Israel.

Milei’s positive image rose from 46.3% to 49% between April and May, according to a poll published on Wednesday by CB Consultora Opinión Pública. The president’s strength is tied to his success in reducing inflation, which dropped from 25% monthly in December 2024 to just over 2.8% in April. May’s expectations for the CPI are close to 2%, a result of zero money issuance and a severe cut in public spending, with extreme measures such as total cessation of public works and the dismissal of over 40,000 state employees, along with zero issuance.

Argentines are fed up with inflation that has long eroded their salaries and complicated any long-term projects. The exhaustion is so palpable that they seem willing to accept the excesses of whoever manages to tame it. They did it in the 1990s when they supported the ultra-liberal policies of Carlos Menem, and they are doing it now with Milei. The president’s “cultural war” is now just background noise accompanying the economic successes that he clings to in order to win the upcoming legislative elections in October.

The day after La Libertad Avanza’s victory in the municipal elections, Milei attacked Pro, Macri’s party, which ranked third in the final results. Pro has governed Buenos Aires for 20 years, and the far-right had put all its efforts into seizing it. “Perhaps Macri should understand that his time has passed,” said Milei, having achieved his goal of establishing himself as the main leader of the wide spectrum of the right and anti-Peronism in Argentina. With Macri expelled from his favorites’ pantheon, Milei subdued Pro with an agreement in Buenos Aires province without having to give anything in return. “The leaders are taking note that Pro is an outdated tool, useless for ending Kirchnerism,” he said.

The fight with Macri had an additional motivation for Milei: to defend the use of fake news as an electoral weapon. “Freedom of expression is above all,” he said in defense of an AI-generated video in which Macri called for voting for the far-right on the eve of the capital’s elections. For the president, the criminal complaint filed by Pro was a matter of “Republican nerds,” and Macri was a “whiner” who never understood the new forms of communication used by young people. As an extra, he stated that journalists lie “90% of the time.”

Milei advances with hardly any checks. Divided between Kirchnerists and anti-Kirchnerists, Peronism risks losing control of its last bastion, Buenos Aires province, in the upcoming national legislative elections in October. Pro is bleeding due to defections to La Libertad Avanza, and the UCR, the centennial party that led the democratic transition in 1983, teeters on the brink of insignificance. The only hint of resistance is inorganic, outside political parties and unions. Last Wednesday, retirees, doctors, scientists, teachers, people with disabilities, social movements, and feminist groups marched in front of Congress. This diverse group united in rejection of the chainsaw that Milei wields against the state.

The Casa Rosada enjoys the lack of rivals. In the week following his electoral victory, Milei signed a decree that limits the right to strike, an issue that Argentines associate with decades of social struggles. As expected, the measure clashed with the courts, but it made it clear what path the Casa Rosada has chosen. With that same logic, the president renewed his attack on abortion, which has been legal in Argentina since 2020. In a conference at AmCham, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Argentina, he said the progressive agenda is responsible for the decline in births. “Now they are realizing that they went too far in attacking the family, attacking both lives, and we are paying for it with falling birth rates,” he said. “They should have thought about it earlier; we could have avoided many murders in the wombs of mothers,” he continued.

Other battles are more silent. On May 21, three days after the election, Milei downgraded the Secretariat of Human Rights to a subsecretariat and eliminated the autonomy of the National Archive of Memory and the ESMA Site of Memory Museum—located where the Navy’s School of Mechanics torture center operated. He did the same with the National Genetic Data Bank, created to help the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo identify grandchildren appropriated by the dictatorship. This represents, in any case, a change in priorities made in the name of austerity: while the Secretariat of Human Rights suffers the effects of the chainsaw, the budget of the state intelligence agency, SIDE, has increased by 68% since January, according to data from the Ministry of Economy.