Can Javier Milei’s radical libertarianism save Argentina?

Argentina needs saving. Annual inflation is 113%. The peso’s black-market value against the dollar has fallen by half this year. After decades of economic mismanagement, mostly under Peronist administrations, Argentines are fed up with their venal and incompetent politicians. Their dismay has helped propel Javier Milei, a self-described libertarian and “anarcho-capitalist” who entered Congress only in 2021, to become the front-runner for the presidential election in October. Even by the standards of Argentine politics, he can sound eccentric: he is said to have hired a medium to consult Conan, his dead mastiff.

Nevertheless, Mr Milei talks a good game. He is steeped in neoliberal economics, as he displays in a three-hour interview with The Economist. He wants to privatise all the sclerotic state companies, dollarise the economy and reduce the country’s deficit to zero in his first year. His political and economic models, he says, are Australia, Israel, Ireland and New Zealand. For years talk of free-market capitalism has been a guaranteed vote-loser in bloated, statist Argentina. Past attempts to liberalise have all faltered. Yet if Mr Milei wins the election next month the country could, in theory, become again a laboratory for exciting, dynamism-promoting ideas.