Milei delivers blunt inaugural speech
Tells Argentina to brace for harsh adjustments
BUENOS AIRES — It was not an uplifting inaugural address. Rather, Argentina’s newly empowered President Javier Milei presented figures to lay bare the scope of the nation’s economic “emergency” and sought to prepare the public for a shock adjustment with drastic public spending cuts.
“We don’t have alternatives and we don’t have time. We don’t have margin for sterile discussions. Our country demands action, and immediate action. The political class left the country at the brink of its biggest crisis in history,” he said in his inaugural address to thousands of supporters in the capital, Buenos Aires. “We don’t desire the hard decisions that will be need to be made in coming weeks, but lamentably they didn't leave us any option.”
South America’s secondlargest economy is suffering 143 percent annual inflation, the currency has plunged, and four in 10 Argentines are impoverished. The nation has a yawning fiscal deficit, a trade deficit of $43 billion, plus a daunting $45 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund, with $10.6 billion due to the multilateral and private creditors by April. “There’s no money” is Milei’s common refrain. He repeated it Sunday to explain why a gradualist approach to the situation, which would require financing, was not an option.
But he promised the adjustment would almost entirely affect the state rather than the private sector, and that it represented the first step toward regaining prosperity.
“We know that in the short term the situation will worsen, but soon we will see the fruits of our effort, having created the base for solid and sustainable growth,” he said.
Milei, 53, rose to fame on television with profanity-laden tirades against what he called the political caste. He parlayed his popularity into a congressional seat and then, just as swiftly, into a presidential run. The overwhelming victory of the self-declared “anarcho-capitalist” in the August primaries sent shock waves through the political landscape and upended the race.
Argentines disillusioned with the economic status quo were receptive to an outsider’s outlandish ideas to remedy their woes and transform the nation. He won the election’s Nov. 19 second round decisively — and sent packing the Peronist political force that dominated Argentina for decades. Still, he is likely to encounter fierce opposition from the Peronist movement’s lawmakers and the unions it controls, whose members have said they refuse to lose wages.
Earlier on Sunday, Milei was sworn in inside the National Congress building, and outgoing President Alberto Fernández placed the presidential sash upon him. Some of the assembled lawmakers chanted, “Liberty!”
Afterward, he broke tradition by delivering his inaugural address not to assembled lawmakers but to his supporters gathered outside — with his back turned to the legislature. He blamed the outgoing government for putting Argentina on the path toward hyperinflation while the economy stagnated, saying the political class “has ruined our lives.”
“In the last 12 years, GDP per capita fell 15 percent in a context in which we accumulated 5,000 percent inflation. As such, for more than a decade we have lived in stagflation. This is the last rough patch before starting the reconstruction of Argentina,” he said. “It won’t be easy; 100 years of failure aren’t undone in a day. But it begins in a day, and today is that day.”
Given the general bleakness of Milei’s message, the crowd listened attentively and cheered only occasionally. Many waved Argentine flags and, to a lesser extent, the yellow Gadsden flag that is often associated with the US libertarian right and which Milei and his supporters have adopted.