Now that 86.59% of the votes have been counted, Argentina has a new president. This is Javier Milei, who has been involved in that country’s politics in recent years.

Irate, outspoken and spontaneous, Milei insulted politicians and promised to dollarize the economy, although he was also forced to seek consensus to win Sunday’s runoff. He put away the chainsaw he used to wave as his banner and now he looks ‘mchanged’.

The ultra-liberal and anti-establishment economist won the primaries by breaking Argentina’s two-tiered system and calling for “dynamizing” the Central Bank, cutting government spending, minimizing the role of the state and putting an end to the ‘political caste and thieves’. .”

Furthermore, it denies that there is a gender pay gap and rejects the consensus of 30,000 people disappeared during the last dictatorship (1976-1983), established by human rights organizations, estimating that figure at less than a third.

With these types of proposals, which were previously “marginal and now became central”, he became a leader of “unusual public relevance for the hardest right in Argentina”, Gabriel Vommaro, a political scientist at the University of Argentina, told AFP. .

His style is that of an angry candidate who calls for channeling in him the anger of those disappointed in Peronism, the political movement that has marked Argentina’s history since the 1940s and which emerged around the figure of the populist soldier Juan Domingo Perón. and led by the Judicial Party.

With copious, messy hair for which he is nicknamed ‘the wig’, Milei is also often called ‘crazy’. But to this he replies: “Do you know the difference between a genius and a madman? The succes”.

Milei as an ‘influencer’ was born on television in 2015 and starred in furious economic tirades on opinion programs. Later, his comments fueled social networks and reached young people, for many of whom the ‘Peluca’ speech was new and rebellious.

Milei worked in the private sector until 2021, when he was elected deputy of the newly formed La Libertad Avanza party. Since then, it has broken Argentina’s two-tiered system and dominated the media agenda.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1970, he played football as a young man and sang in a band that covered Rolling Stones songs.

According to ‘Loco’, the unauthorized biography of journalist Juan Luis González, Milei does not acknowledge the death of his dog Conan and calls him one of the ‘five’ dogs/sons that accompany him.

His other four English mastiffs are Conan clones, born from a procedure that Milei had performed in the United States. He communicates with them, the living and the dead, thanks to the supposed teachings of a ‘medium’ specialized in ‘interspecies communication’.

Single, without children and with few friends, he recently took the actress and comedian Fátima Flórez, his new girlfriend, to television. There he learned to make the heart gesture with his fingers. “We are very explosive,” he said.

He studied economics at the renowned University of Belgrano and completed two postgraduate degrees at local institutions. He has published several books and has also been accused of plagiarizing entire paragraphs.

For her part, her partner Victoria Villarruel is the daughter of a veteran of the war against the United Kingdom over the Malvinas Islands in 1982 and the niece of another person prosecuted for his actions during the dictatorship.

The lawyer is president of the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims, a non-governmental organization dedicated to making visible the deaths caused by terrorist organizations in Argentina in the 1970s and recognizing the rights of guerrilla -victims.

Since 2021, she has been a national representative together with Milei and now as a candidate for vice-president she is promoting her agenda to “reconstruct the part of history” that, she understands, the governments of the now deceased Néstor Kirchner “erased”. 2003-2007), Cristina Fernández (2007-2015) and Alberto Fernández (2019-2023).

Villarruel, who was called “unhinged” and a “bad person” by the president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, supports the army that “suffers from the demonization and mistreatment of Kirchnerism” and emphasizes that “they that were not’. During the last military dictatorship, 30,000 disappeared, but 8,751 according to the names in the Parque de la Memoria, located on the north coast of Buenos Aires (8,860 from 1969 to 1983).

“It is important that we recognize that there are victims of terrorism who do not have human rights,” he said in the last vice-presidential debate, and has reiterated many times that he would propose an audit of the government’s human rights record. he considers a ‘black hole’.

Both she and Milei are ‘pro-life’ and are trying to revise the law that allows abortion up to week 14 or due to rape or danger to life, since, she assured, the spirit of the law is not respected and there are “mothers who undergo abortions .”term boys.” (JO)