Matías Bianchi & María Esperanza Casullo
It has been one year since Javier Milei took office in Argentina. As he warned during his campaign, his administration has been plagued by authoritarian practices, verbal and institutional violence, and policies that openly curtail citizens’ rights. Argentina currently possesses significant democratic capital. We must now ask how long this capital will last in resisting the libertarian wave.
During the 2023 election campaign, the Argentinian think tank Asuntos del Sur published a study assessing the levels of authoritarianism among presidential candidates. The analysis was grounded in the theoretical framework developed by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their book How Democracies Die, which explores a disturbing paradox: nowadays, democracies are eroded not ‘from the outside,’ but rather, from within, by democratically elected leaderships. In Asuntos del Sur’s study, Milei’s candidacy sounded alarm bells across every dimension put forward by the authors.
In its 2024 issue, Asuntos del Sur picked up the research by assessing what had happened in the first year of government. If there is one thing that Javier Milei cannot be accused of, it is failing to keep his promises. The study, Democratic Alert: Critical Markers of Authoritarian Risk in Javier Milei’s First Year in Office, analyzed the president’s speeches, social media images, and policies. What it found is a vision of Argentine and global politics as a Manichean and moralizing conflict, without nuance, between a figure with messianic characteristics and a series of supposedly immoral and evil adversaries. Milei characterizes entire social sectors as communists, socialists, collectivists, criminals, parasites, or indoctrinators of youth. This Manichean antagonism is central to the denial of the legitimacy of his political opponents, one of the criteria for authoritarian risk identified by Levitsky and Ziblatt.
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