Socialism will ruin West, warns Argentina president

ARGENTINA’S new radical Right-wing pres- ident Javier Milei stunned leaders gathered at Davos with a blistering speech warning that the West risked going down the path of socialism and ruin.

Milei told politicians gathered at the World Economic Forum that ‘neo-Marxists’ put at risk the prosperity enjoyed by advanced economies.

His comments, littered with criticisms of feminism, abortion and environmentalism, are likely to have appalled many. But he won applause as he declared ‘long live freedom, dammit’ at the end of the halfhour address in which he lauded business leaders as ‘heroes’ and castigated state controls and regulation.

Earlier, he had met Foreign Secretary David Cameron for talks.

Milei, an acerbic economist and TV commentator with little political experience, took office last month, often wielding a chainsaw to underscore his aim to slash the size of the state. There was no chainsaw yesterday but Milei’s speech – in Spanish – still stunned the audience.

‘Today, I’m here to tell you that the western world is in danger,’ Milei said.

‘Because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.’

He added: ‘We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to problems that afflict the citizens of the world – they are the root cause. No one is better placed than us Argentines to testify to these points.’

He defended highly paid capitalists, saying: ‘You are social benefactors, you are heroes, you are creators of the most extraordinary period of prosperity we’ve ever seen.

‘Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral: if you make money, it’s because you offer a better product at a better price, thereby contributing to general wellbeing. Do not surrender to the advance of the state.’