Can Javier Milei’s Deregulatory Frenzy Buoy the Global Right?

The goal of the president, an obsessive laissez-faire economist elected in 2023, is to rescue his country from what he calls the “filthy hole” of a corrupted public sector and forge a new entrepreneurial culture. For a nation richly endowed in minerals and farmland, accustomed to perverse economic failure, this has come as a shock. Printing money was long the inflationary answer for a bloated state. Milei has stopped the presses, eliminated 10 ministries and laid off some 63,000 public-sector workers, or more than 15 percent of the federal work force. He has slashed federal spending by 30 percent; cut inflation to 32 percent from over 200 percent annually; and produced a budget surplus in a country where, in 110 of the last 123 years, there was a deficit.

This purge, symbolized by the chain saw Milei adopted as his campaign totem, enthralled Donald Trump, who viewed the administrative state as a den of unelected bureaucrats out to thwart him. Milei was the first foreign leader to meet the newly re-elected Trump in November 2024. They bonded in their contempt for international institutions, conventional diplomacy, human rights and climate change policy. There are differences — Milei is a voracious reader and dismissive of tariffs — but these hardly matter when MAGA is used interchangeably for the two countries. “He’s MAGA all the way, he’s ‘Make Argentina Great Again!’” Trump said of Milei at the White House last year.

When Trump took office, he embarked on an assault on the federal bureaucracy that looked a lot like the drastic measures Milei adopted in Argentina. At the Conservative Political Action Conference last year, Milei presented a chain saw to Elon Musk, whose short-lived Department of Government Efficiency took charge of the cutting. Since then, the chain saw has become an icon for the nationalist right-wing leaders at the forefront of a global backlash against the liberal establishment.

Its targets are not only economic; they are cultural. Milei, working the image of the leather-jacketed man of the people, wants to slice through progressive assumptions, in line with other New Right leaders, whose followers range from Silicon Valley potentates like Peter Thiel to outcasts from the knowledge economy. Milei snarls at the word “woke” and opposes abortion in one of only five Latin American countries where it is legal. Not given to modesty, he has declared himself “one of the two most relevant politicians on planet Earth. One is Trump and the other is me.”