MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Outside rightwing economist jumps into Argentine politics to fight immoral rulers

Milei stressed it was a fight between those “who work our arses off” against the political caste who has a “PhD in Immorality”

Economist Javier Milei delivered a speech before a large, young crowd as he launched his candidacy this weekend to run for a seat in Congress representing the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires on behalf of the Avanza Libertad party.

Milei intends to capitalize on the conservative / rightwing voter's disappointment regarding former President Mauricio Macri and his Juntos por el Cambio (JxC) alliance, which when it comes down to proposals and past deeds, has become almost unrecognizeable from the ruling Frente de Todos (FdT) of the Fernández's (President Alberto and Vice President Cristina de Kirchner).

Milei is joined by lawyer Victoria Villarroel, who chairs the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims (CELTYV), an association which vindicates the Armed Forces' fight against leftwing terrorism in the 1970s and defends some of the officers who have been convicted ffor human rights violations.

“We must demolish the model defended by the political caste, which all it has generated is to transform the richest country in the world into one of the poorest countries in the world,” Milei said in his speech.

“Today the reconstruction of Argentina begins. Last year I celebrated my birthday here, and I promised that I was going to get involved in politics, that I was going to get into the mud to kick out politicians in their asses,” he added.

Under the motto “They against us,” Milei called voters to unite behind the idea of freedom and took preferential aim at the left. “Whereveir their model was applied it was a disaster economically, socially and culturally.“

Milei underscored that “we, who want liberalism, are based on unrestricted respect for the other's life project, based on life, property and freedom. The others said they loved the poor, but they multiplied them.”

He also dubbed President Alberto Fernández's handling of the coronavirus pandemic as “genocidal.”

“The ruling party told us last year that it would take care of health regardless of the economy. And they really did not care, we fell three times [deeper than] the rest of the world. This genocidal government, for not having bought the vaccines correctly, ended up killing more 100,000 people in total,” Milei said.

Regarding government officials, the economist said that with the VIP vaccination scandal (a scheme to immunize party members and friends before people who should have been prioritized as per sanitary criteria) they had already “graduated from Immorality” School, but now that a list of guests who visited the presidential residence at wee hours when the rest of Argentines were under quarantine became public “they ended up obtaining a PhD with the ‘partusas’ ('uncontrolled gatherings, which include alcoholic beverages and sex,' Chilean slang as per Spain's Royal Academy of the Language) in Olivos while they kept us all locked up.“

Milei went on: ”I ask you to join us in this moral revolution, to go to a society that wants to live with the fruit of its work. First of all, we are those who work our arses off, not the political caste. It is not an easy task, but I did not come here to guide lambs, I came here to wake up lions.”

When major political parties make their ideals unrecognizeable, outsiders to politics have the best chance of success, as it happened to former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez who was third in the polls not long before being elected.