BORIS JOHNSON: Meet Argie president taking buzzsaw to large authorities
You have to admire the sheer cojones of the guy.
I am sitting in Buenos Aires, in the curiously darkened office of the President of Argentina. He is Javier Milei, 53, the chainsaw-wielding, bushy-sideburned wild man of Hayekian free-market thinking – who is finally giving this beautiful country the economic medicine it needs.
It is almost ten months now since his election, and he has been hacking manically at the excrescences of the state, taking a swingeing five per cent of GDP out of public spending. You may remember that footage of him, before the election, standing in front of a huge whiteboard showing the Argentinian government.
Thumbs up for freedom: Boris and his wife Carrie with Argentina’s radical president Javier Milei
He was shouting ‘Afuera! Afuera!’ or ‘Out! Out!’ – and ripping whole departments out of the diagram. Well, he has done it.
Of the 23 ministries he inherited, eight have been brutally amputated by his roaring buzzsaw, their civil servants dismissed to find jobs in the private sector. He has axed the crazy state subsidies on fuel. He is abolishing the deranged Peronist taxes on exports.
He is taking on the unions of the state-owned airline, and he is at war with the academics of the state-funded universities. Despite his orgy of calculated fiscal mayhem his popularity remains astonishingly high, and for good reason.
Bit by bit, he is succeeding. Inflation had been running at 58 per cent per month – that’s right, per month. If you buy a beer in one of the lovely cafes in this city, you notice that the prices have been continually amended in chalk, to allow for spools of extra zeroes. Thanks to Milei, those price increases have slowed dramatically – down to 2 per cent per month, and he is utterly determined to drive it down further.
He knows the damage inflation has done to Argentina – the destruction of livelihoods for the low-paid, the erosion of confidence and investment. He looks at us with his bright blue eyes and expatiates on his plans.
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overty is now falling, he says; growth will return; and as he talks I find myself willing him on, willing him to succeed for the sake of Argentina and the world. I believe he will, because he is able to say and do things that no Argentinian president has done before.
We are here in the palace of Evita Peron, and just outside is the balcony from which she harangued the masses. We are in the very building in which President Galtieri and his gold braided generals plotted the invasion of the Falklands – and yet here is an Argentinian president with the sheer guts to say that he is an admirer of the woman who ruthlessly defeated that junta and recaptured the islands.
Yes, amigos, he is a fan of Margaret Thatcher – and says so. That’s courage; that’s balls.
When an opponent challenged him on this admission, and asked how he could find it in himself to praise the woman who sunk the Belgrano, he answered simply. It was absurd to despise Thatcher, he said; it was like despising Kylian Mbappe for scoring goals against Argentina.
‘We were involved in a war and we lost the war,’ he said. He admires Thatcher for the same reason he admires Churchill – because she was a fighter for the one thing he believes matters most in economics, in politics, and in life: freedom.
He backs the freedom of the individual to live your life as you please – provided you do no harm to others. He backs your right to smoke whatever you want, to love and marry whoever you choose.
He backs the cause of freedom around the world – vigorously supporting Volodomyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians in their struggle against Putin’s neo-imperialist aggression. He vehemently backs the Israelis against Hamas and Hezbollah. Indeed, he is so passionate on the subject he is actually converting to Judaism.
He is in favour of the scientific freedom to clone animals and has four cloned English bull mastiffs he calls his ‘children’ and whose privacy he jealously protects.
He seems to be the living embodiment of the libertarianism he espouses, and with every speech and tweet he reinforces his message in a slogan that every Argentinian voter has now heard: ‘Viva la libertad, carajo!’ – which translates roughly as ‘Long live freedom, you f****r!’
You may, of course, think this is merely the kind of zealotry born of crisis. You may think Milei’s libertarianism is a response to Argentina’s unique economic predicament, because it has been so chronically dreadful in controlling the political borrowing and spending that fuels inflation.
You may therefore think that Milei’s mission has no relevance to us in Britain – and there I am not so sure. Can we really say we are getting the right balance, here in the UK, between the powers of the state and of the individual?
Can we say that the flame of freedom burns as bright as it did? Look at us under this new Labour government – the whole population, cowering for months as we wait for this punishment budget. We are all sitting blindfolded as we prepare to be clobbered by Rachel Reeves, not knowing which instrument she will use.
Will she hit us with capital gains tax or inheritance tax? Or will she break Labour’s manifesto promise and whack us with more national insurance? We have global investors sitting on their hands or abandoning their plans; we have more and more rich people fleeing the country – so that emigration is now becoming an economic problem for this country, for the first time since the 1970s.
We have a raft of new and totally pointless employment legislation, planning to give workers the right to ‘switch off’ at weekends, and sundry other nonsense; and can we say the Starmer regime is doing anything to protect the freedom of the individual?
Javier Milei waving a buzzsaw at a political rally last year. He seems to be the living embodiment of the libertarianism he espouses
On the contrary, they have scrapped the Tory measure to protect freedom of speech at university; and look at the case of the childminder, 41-year-old Lucy Connolly, who has been jailed for almost three years – just because of something she put on X/Twitter after the Southport murders.
What she said was vile; truly horrible. She called for immigrant hostels to be set on fire. She certainly deserved to be punished, perhaps with a fine or community service. But she is a mother of a young child, with no previous criminal record, and I can see no evidence that her disgusting remark – which she deleted within three hours – was intended to be seriously acted upon.
Was it really right to bang her up for nearly three years? In the clink? When the Starmer government is releasing all manner of serious sexual and violent offenders, because there is no room in the jails? You have to wonder.
Milei is right about freedom. It is precious and it can be eroded. Under this Labour government, ever more people’s cash is being taken by the state, to be spent by government on our behalf, while the state is prescribing in ever more detail what we should do and say, even what we should think.
It will come to the point where one day we will slap the table and cry, enough! Viva la libertad, carajo!
