The world’s craziest politician – and why he could be good news for Falkland Islanders
AS POLITICAL stunts go, it’s certainly eye-catching. Javier Milei wields a buzzing chainsaw above his head to show what he’d do to bloated government bureaucracy and ‘woke’ ideology. ‘Viva la libertad, carajo!’ (Long live freedom, goddammit!) he shouts, as supporters scream with delight. But given that this very unconventional politician has also boasted of being a ‘tantric sex coach’ who enjoys threesomes and believes his dead dog gives him political advice via a medium, his antics with power tools may be the least startling thing about him.
The populist firebrand – who goes into today’s presidential election in Argentina as the favourite – also vows to scrap the country’s currency, allow people to sell their internal organs and has denounced the Pope as a servant of the Devil.
In August, Milei, a libertarian ‘anarcho-capitalist’ economist, pulled off a shock victory in the presidential primaries, winning 30 per cent of the vote, putting him ahead of the establishment conservatives and the centre Left party currently in power. In large part because of support from young voters, especially men, disenchanted with conventional politicians, he and his tiny Right-wing party, Liberty Advances, have continued to storm the polls.
That ‘The Wig’ (a nickname borne from his wild mop of hair) is favourite speaks volumes for the desperation of a country that a century ago was one of the richest in the world. Today, 40 per cent of the 46million population live in poverty, and inflation is set to hit 190 per cent by the year end.
For many Argentines, who have lived with decades of ineptitude and corruption from both Left and Right-wing governments, their own version of Donald Trump (who he admires) represents the last resort after having tried everything else.
The 52-year-old bus driver’s son’s eccentric character is, for many, an attractive alternative as he campaigns with his four dogs and party colleague Lilia Lemoine, who is the only person entrusted to do his hair.
HIS four lumbering English mastiffs are cloned from a previous pet, and Milei, who has never married or started a family, calls them his ‘little four-legged children’. Despite being a longtime confirmed bachelor, Milei recently acquired a girlfriend, a buxom comedian and impersonator named Fatima Florez.
A self-confessed Anglophile, he is a fan of Margaret Thatcher and, unlike so many Argentines, doesn’t demand that Britain hands over the Falkland Islands. Indeed, he says that when, aged 11, he criticised the Argentine military junta’s 1982 invasion of the islands, his father thrashed him for being unpatriotic.
Ideally he would like the British Government to agree a version of its 1997 transfer of Hong Kong to China, saying: ‘It has to be a solution that satisfies [the UK], that satisfies Argentina and that satisfies those who live on the islands.’ Such a view is in defiance of the current Buenos Aires government’s adamant claim of sovereignty over what it calls ‘Islas Malvinas’.
Top of Milei’s slash-and-burn political agenda is to bin Argentina’s currency, the peso, which he’s described as ‘not even good as manure’ and replace it with the US dollar in a desperate bid to arrest galloping inflation. He’s also pledged to slash taxes, privatise state-owned companies and scrap government subsidies.
‘If I had to choose between the state and the mafia, I would choose the mafia,’ he has said. ‘Because the mafia has codes, the mafia adapts, the mafia doesn’t lie. And above all, the mafia competes.’
Also, he’s dismissed global warming as a ‘socialist lie’. His brainwave for healthcare? Allow people to sell their body parts, his argument being that since prostitutes sell their bodies, why shouldn’t everyone else? Asked if he’d also allow parents to sell their children, he replied: ‘That depends.’
On foreign policy, however, Milei is more in step with the Western mainstream, having said: ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with the communists of Cuba, China and North Korea.’ Brought up in Buenos Aires, he briefly flirted with a career as a footballer but studied to be an economist. Yet the worlds of academia and think-tanks weren’t enough for an exhibitionist who, as a teenager, sang in a rock band that played Rolling Stones covers and who still wears a black leather jacket.
Around five years ago he became a regular pundit on TV chat shows, delighting producers who’d never heard an economist vowing to ‘kick politicians out on their arses’ while boasting about his sex life.
Milei claims to have been an instructor in tantric sex – a slow, meditative form of intercourse based on Eastern philosophies where the aim is not an orgasm but enjoyment of the process. He also claims to have had numerous threesomes, adding – with an economist’s precision – that 90 per cent were with two women. He says ex-girlfriends call him the ‘naughty cow’.
But biographer Juan Luis Gonzalez paints an altogether different picture, insisting that until recently Milei was an ‘extremely lonely guy who spent 15 Christmases and 15 New Year’s Eves toasting champagne alone with his dog’.
That said, Milei seems to relish the notoriety of being the subject of a book titled El Loco (The Madman). It recounts how Argentina’s presidential favourite studies telepathy and has a medium to ‘communicate’ with his dog Conan, which died in 2017.
Milei retorted: ‘What I do in my house is my business. And if, as they [his political opponents] say, he is my political adviser, the truth is, he wiped the floor with them.’
IN FACT, he rarely denies anything outrageous said about him. For example, when an opponent called him ‘a dishevelled panellist who sleeps with eight dogs and his sister’, Milei’s only response was to point out he doesn’t have eight dogs.
But there is one thing that may cost him votes. Nearly two-thirds of Argentines are Catholic (including Milei, who wants to ban abortion and same-sex marriage) and many voters are appalled by his vicious attacks on Argentine-born Pope Francis.
He’s called the Pope a ‘filthy Leftist’, and the ‘representative of the evil one on Earth’ over his support for ‘social justice’ policies to help the poor and under-privileged.
If none of Milei and his two rivals for the presidency (an economy minister and a centre-Right former security minister) gets at least 40 per cent of today’s vote, there will be a run-off next month.
Today, Falkland Islanders will watch on with fascination as Argentina goes to the polls – but the country’s ‘mini-Trump’ may have already been told the result by his dog, from beyond the grave.
He teaches tantric sex and has had numerous threesomes