Sex guru, cosplayer, economist: will Javier Milei be Argentina’s next president? 

In 2019 Javier Milei – the front-runner in Argentina’s presidential election later this month – attended a cosplay convention. He wore black and yellow spandex and wielded a golden staff. This alter ego, a character of his own invention, was called General Ancap, the leader of “Liberland”, a country “where nobody pays taxes”. The name was a portmanteau for anarcho-capitalist, a strand of libertarianism that seeks to abolish the state in favour of unfettered free markets. As Milei told a gaggle of amused adolescents, the general’s mission was to “kick Keynesians and collectivists in the ass”.

Milei may soon become the leader of a real country, but it’s hard to predict which sort of character he will play. In five years he has gone from being an economist known mostly for his eccentric television appearances to the man to beat in the race to lead South America’s second-largest economy. At a recent campaign event, he channelled his inner rock star. Jumping frenetically around the stage in a leather jacket, he roared the lyrics of a rock song in front of 15,000 fans: “I am the king in a lost world!” In interviews, however, he prefers to look like a dishevelled academic, with a wild mop-top and glasses that threaten to slip off his nose.

A century ago, Argentina was one of the world’s richest countries; today, it is synonymous with crisis. The economy has been mismanaged under both left-wing and centre-right administrations, resulting in annual inflation at 138%, the third-highest anywhere in the world. The share of people who cannot afford both a basic bag of groceries and an essential service like transport or health care has risen from 26% in 2017 to 40% today. Argentina owes the International Monetary Fund an eye-watering $44bn – almost a third of the fund’s entire lending portfolio – yet the country’s central bank has no dollar reserves to pay back the loan. Corruption is rampant, trust in institutions is low and voters are exhausted.

Milei entered public life amid this stew of discontent, blaming what he calls a political “caste” for stealing from hard-working Argentines. This caste, according to Milei, includes corrupt legislators; their cronies in the private sector whose businesses profit from government contracts; self-interested trade-union leaders; and media outlets that rely on state advertising. He also singles out the central bank for criticism, arguing that it does the government’s bidding by printing money to finance the deficit, thus worsening inflation. Milei proposes to slash public spending by 15% of GDP, eliminate most taxes, cut the number of ministries from 18 to eight, “blow up” the central bank and swap the country’s flailing currency, the peso, for the United States dollar.

Milei’s ideas have proved popular with Argentines, leading to a sea-change in the political discourse. The country’s centre-right coalition recently floated the idea of allowing the dollar to become legal tender alongside the peso. The left-wing coalition in power criticises the welfare handouts it instituted over two decades ago. Politicians have adopted the term “caste” to describe everyone but themselves.

Since he exploded onto the public scene, Milei’s complex personal life has been as prominent as his political pronouncements. He has boasted on television about being a sex guru whom former girlfriends call “the naughty cow”, introduced audiences to his four cloned English mastiffs and spoken openly about his complicated relationship with his parents, whom he long dismissed as merely his “progenitors”. In a country of 46m people, he has nearly 7m followers across his social-media accounts. Young men in particular like his rhetorical style, which often includes aggressive outbursts against opponents. The international media have labelled him as Argentina’s answer to Donald Trump – an association he doesn’t repudiate.

Although he enjoys experimenting with different personas, Milei’s latest role – Argentina’s president-in-waiting – doesn’t seem to suit him. He claims to have lost 20kg since his campaign started this year; his pinstriped outfit now swamps his five-foot-eight frame. (Though he says it is because he has been eating healthier, it’s hard to believe stress hasn’t played a role.) If he were to win the election, he would become the world’s first avowedly libertarian president. Many countries are now led by populist demagogues, but Milei might prove to be the strangest of the lot.

Javier Gerardo Milei was born in 1970, on October 22nd – the same day this year’s presidential election will be held. His beginnings were not auspicious. Milei has claimed that his father regularly beat him up. In his autobiography, he writes that his sister, Karina – who is now his campaign manager – and his English mastiff, Conan (from which his four puppies are cloned), are “the only ones who have always been by my side”.

Milei grew up in a comfortable house in Villa Devoto, a residential neighbourhood in Buenos Aires that is now peppered with organic supermarkets and hipster cafés. The Mileis moved there after his father became well-off in circumstances that remain unclear. Originally a bus-driver, Milei’s father eventually bought a fleet of buses and later established a finance company and a small property firm.

According to Juan Luis González, whose unauthorised biography of Milei, “El Loco” (The Crazy One), was published earlier this year, Milei’s father considered his son a troublemaker and used to call him “crazy”. He bragged to friends about disciplining Milei with a belt. In interviews Milei has recalled how, when he was 11, he criticised the military dictatorship’s declaration of war on Britain over the Falkland Islands. His father thrashed him for his lack of patriotism – so violently that his sister, who is three years younger, fainted at the sight. His mother was complicit in the abuse: she called Milei from the hospital to tell him that if Karina died, it would be his fault.

Neighbours say Milei’s parents kept to themselves. His mother was a housewife famed for her immaculately coiffed hair; his father was often absent. But the young Milei seemed different. Leonor Moro, a paediatrician who lived two doors down, and whose niece sometimes played with Milei, described him as “un liero, jorobón” – a cheeky boy with a reputation for cracking jokes. Others who knew him at the time also describe Milei as a bonachon – a good guy.

In secondary school Milei was outspoken and seen as odd, though classmates generally thought well of him. “He was always very histrionic and energetic. But in my memory he was deeply good-natured – a very gentle and good person,” recalled Diego Vila, a former schoolmate who joined a Rolling Stones tribute band that Milei started in his final year of school. As frontman, Milei styled his beehive-sized hair to look more like Mick Jagger’s. (Today he attributes his hairdo that ends in impressive sideburns to the work of the “invisible hand”, a wry reference to Adam Smith’s description of the forces that move the free market.)

Several times a week Milei would travel to a working-class suburb of Buenos Aires, where he trained at Chacarita Juniors, a football club. He earned a reputation for being a fearless goalkeeper. Eduardo Grecco, Milei’s former football coach, said he was known as “el loco Milei”, the crazy Milei, “because he would throw himself at the ball, nothing mattered to him, not even hurting himself”. For a while he flirted with the idea of going professional, and Grecco told me he had a chance.

Milei’s loco personality on the football pitch earned him a degree of admiration. Although he was two years younger than his teammates, he “made himself respected”, remembered Marcelo Venturelli, who used to play with an older group. “In football changing rooms, when arguments get heated, they always end up the same way. Someone throws a punch. And when that punch flew, Milei knew how to defend himself.”

Neither Venturelli nor Vila recognises the Milei of their youth in the Milei of today. “If you ask me, this Milei surprises me. He is not the Milei I knew,” Venturelli said. “I’ve never seen him as angry as when he gets angry on television.” Vila agreed and worried that the character Milei created for the media eventually “ate him up”. “It’s hard for me to see him on TV now,” added Vila. “He’s angry all the time.”

Though sociable enough at school, Milei had few deep friendships and no girlfriends, according to González, the biographer. It took Milei until his early 30s to make a proper friend, another unorthodox economist with whom he later fell out. Since becoming a public figure, he has had several girlfriends – some of whom have been actresses or singers who look like pin-ups. Until recently, though, claims González, Milei was “an extremely lonely guy who spent a dozen Christmases and a dozen New Year’s Eves toasting champagne alone with his dog.”

Milei’s interest in economics stems from the financial crisis that engulfed Argentina in the late 1980s. Between 1989 and 1990 inflation reached annual average rates of over 2,600%. Milei recalls that he would go to the supermarket with his mother and see customers scrambling to stay ahead of the shopkeepers with sticker-guns, who would increase prices several times a day.

Milei enrolled at the University of Belgrano, a private college in an exclusive neighbourhood. As the financial crisis worsened, he dropped his dreams of playing football professionally and focused on economics instead. Immediately, he stood out. “He was an outstanding student. Restless, very intelligent,” said Víctor Beker, the head of the university’s economics department at the time. Milei would regularly go to Beker’s office to ask questions after class. In one such drop-in he volunteered that he could write two assignments at the same time with both hands. “He was a person who valued himself very highly and who thought that he had skills that others did not have,” remembered Beker.

On other visits, the office doubled up as a shrink’s couch. (As it happens, Milei also saw a therapist for years until he died a few years ago.) Milei would walk in fuming about his abusive parents. Beker believes Milei felt he “had to prove to his parents that they were wrong about him”.

At university, Milei had little to do with his peers, perhaps, suggested Beker, because he found them intellectually lacking. In his fourth year, Beker invited him to work on a project to evaluate the privatisation of Argentina’s telecommunications firms. To end hyperinflation, the new president, Carlos Menem, had pegged the local currency to the dollar, and then privatised many of Argentina’s state-owned firms. For a while, the strategy worked: inflation was brought under control in the 1990s and millions of dollars poured in from abroad. Learning about these successes planted the seeds of Milei’s love for the free market, though it took many years for him to embrace libertarianism.

While at university, Milei completed an internship at the central bank and became well-versed in Keynesianism – the economic philosophy of John Maynard Keynes, who believed that high government spending during a recession could stimulate consumer demand and economic growth. After completing his undergraduate degree, Milei finished a master’s in economics. Alongside this, he worked as an independent consultant. Milei seemingly had no qualms about advising Antonio Bussi, a former military officer, during his run for a seat in Congress in 1999. Bussi was later convicted of crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. (Bussi’s son is running to be a legislator in Argentina’s lower house for Milei’s coalition, Liberty Advances, in the general election.)

By the time Milei started his second master’s degree, in economic theory, he was becoming disillusioned with some of the key ideas of Keynesianism, which he felt had left Argentina’s economy in tatters. Around 2008, a colleague shared an article by Murray Rothbard, the intellectual father of anarcho-capitalism. In an anarcho-capitalist world, the state would cease to exist and all of its provisions, including education, health care, environmental protection and transport infrastructure, would be supplied through voluntary contracts between individuals. This, argued Rothbard, would not only lead to a better-functioning economy, but was also morally correct, since the state finances itself through taxes which citizens pay involuntarily. Unlike classical economists, who believe that competition lowers prices and improves quality, Rothbard argued that single companies which dominated markets could provide superior goods through their ability to produce at scale.

Milei claims he consumed the 150-page article in three hours. “When I finished reading it…I said, ‘Everything I taught in the last 25 years on market structures is wrong.’” (In fact, Milei had only been teaching economics since becoming a master’s student.) Milei adopted anti-statist ideas with the zeal of a religious convert. Soon after, he started devouring books by anti-Keynesian economists. He particularly liked Friedrich Hayek, Keynes’s nemesis, who argued that handing over economic control to the state, rather than to individuals, leads to tyranny.

Rothbard’s influence may help explain why Milei, who often says he is a liberal, found no contradiction in working for a quasi-monopoly. In 2008 he began working for Corporación América, a holding group that controls 37 of Argentina’s 56 airports. Milei eventually became the company’s chief economist.

Eduardo Eurnekian, Corporación América’s billionaire owner, used to control several media channels and would later help Milei in his rise to fame. (Initially, Eurnekian said he supported Milei’s presidential campaign. Recently, however, the two began to clash after Eurnekian said, of Milei, that Argentina couldn’t bear to have another dictator.) According to González, the biographer, it was no coincidence that Milei’s first opinion pieces were published by an online newspaper in which Eurnekian’s nephew has a large stake.

Although Milei made his first television appearance in 2015, he didn’t become a celebrity until three years later. Eurnekian was feuding with the centre-right government and Milei himself didn’t think much of the government’s policies. According to González, Eurnekian tapped his media contacts, suggesting they give Milei airtime.

From 2018 Milei was increasingly invited on to TV and radio shows to entertain audiences as much as to rail against economic policy. He sang the praises of tantric sex, boasting that he could go without ejaculating for three months, and performed a song called “Tantric Bomb” with his popstar girlfriend. He destroyed a piñata shaped like Argentina’s central bank, and he acted in a play called “Milei’s Office”, where he played the role of therapist explaining Argentina’s economic malaise to clients.

As he became more famous, Milei’s views and public persona grew more extreme. When a journalist asked a mundane question about Keynes, he replied: “All I’m saying is that you’re an idiot and you talk about things you don’t know.” He called the centrist mayor of Buenos Aires “a leftist piece of shit” and “a worm” whom he could “squish even in a wheelchair”. Once, he suggested that a politician he disliked should be beheaded with a samurai sword. He has dismissed the pope, who is Argentine, as “a leftist son of a bitch”, “a donkey”, “a jackass” and “an ignoramus”.

With alt-right leaders sweeping into power around the world, Milei began moving away from liberalism towards hard-right conservatism. In 2020, he signed a letter sponsored by Vox, an ultra-nationalist party in Spain, against the advance of international “communism” – in Milei’s conception, a broad array of left-wing ideas that he sees as the world’s greatest ill. Global warming, he later said, was just a “socialist lie”.

Fans urged Milei to enter politics, and in 2021, he announced that he would run for Congress with Liberty Advances, his newly formed coalition. Later that year Milei became the first libertarian deputy elected to the lower house in Argentina’s history. His career had changed but the show went on: every month he would raffle off his congressional salary to fans on social media. He seemed less interested in the business of government – he did not participate in half the parliamentary votes during his first year in office – than in cosying up to the international right. He attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which is hosted by American conservative activists, and posed for photos with a son of Jair Bolsonaro, the populist former president of Brazil, and José Antonio Kast, a Chilean politician and presidential hopeful who has shown sympathy for General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.

When Milei first toyed with the idea of running for president, most people did not take him seriously. At an event in June 2022, which many thought would be the official launch for his presidential campaign, few fans turned up. His detractors smirked when Milei proposed that people should be able to buy and sell bodily organs legally, thinking voters would recoil. It often feels like Milei adopts provocative poses just to see how much he can get away with. When asked whether he thought parents should be able to sell their children, he responded: “it depends.” “Wouldn’t the answer just be no?” the journalist replied, dumbfounded. “If I had a child, I wouldn’t sell it…[but] maybe 200 years from now it could be debated,” said Milei.

But Milei’s ideas don’t seem to have hurt his ratings. In the presidential primaries in August, he was the surprise winner, nabbing 30% of the vote. In September, Tucker Carlson, a former Fox News host, uploaded an interview with Milei on X (previously known as Twitter) that has been viewed 422m times. (Elon Musk, X’s owner, tweeted that the interview was “interesting”, though he later deleted his post.)

Critics worry that Milei has authoritarian instincts. “He gets angry with dissent, he gets angry with those who think differently to him,” said Carlos Maslatón, a former friend and political backer whom Milei purged from his coalition last year along with dozens of others. He claimed that Milei felt threatened by people who took away too much of his limelight (Maslatón is a financial influencer). “This is the behaviour of a king from the time of monarchical absolutism. He is not a democratic person.”

Milei seems to believe that leading Argentina is his destiny. Maslatón said he asked Milei in 2022 whether he would throw his hat in the ring for the presidency; he responded that God had told him to turn Argentina liberal. Other sources have claimed that Milei has supernatural visions. In one, Ayn Rand, the libertarian philosopher, supposedly appeared to him in a bookshop. In another, he saw the resurrection of Christ.

Esotericism crops up surprisingly often in Argentina’s political history: Carlos Menem, the president who privatised state-owned companies in the 1990s, consulted a seer ahead of big decisions. But Milei’s spirituality seems at least partly linked to an attempt to deal with loss and trauma. His visions appear to have become more frequent since the death of his beloved dog in 2017. According to González, he visited a medium to contact Conan in the afterlife. (Milei hasn’t denied rumours that he consults his pets on political strategy; “​​if so,” he has said, “they are the best political analysts in the world.”)

Before Conan’s death, Milei had sent a sample of the dog’s tissue to PerPETuate in Massachusetts, a “genetic preservation” company. Scientists there grew cells from it and sent them to a cloning facility in Texas. After the puppies were born, researchers at the University of California, Davis, made sure their DNA was identical to Conan’s. The process cost $50,000. “[Milei] told me that these clones are the most important thing in his life,” said Dr Ron Gillespie from PerPETuate. He remains in touch with Milei, who pays $100 a year to preserve Conan’s cells in case he’d like to clone more animals in the future.

An interest in the mystical has also prompted Milei to consider converting to Judaism. He has begun consulting a rabbi and says his first trip abroad as president would be to Israel. The week I interviewed him, he told me he was travelling to New York to pray at an ultra-Orthodox congregation before Shabbat; he explained that Moses, who led the Jewish people out of Egypt and into the promised land, was an inspiration. In other interviews he has gone further, likening his sister, Karina, to Moses and himself to Aaron, Moses’s brother and spokesperson.

Milei calls Karina a being of supreme “spiritual purity”. Ever since he decided to run for Congress, she has been his gatekeeper. Everything related to Milei’s career – including, according to one source, the catering for party meetings – must be approved by her. Despite her outsized role, little is known about her other than that she studied public relations, ran a pastry business and enjoys reading tarot cards. Like her brother, she is not married and loves dogs: both siblings refer to their pets as their “four-legged children”. Perhaps not coincidentally, Karina’s dog is called Aaron.

Milei’s autobiography includes a chapter written by his sister, in which she describes how she identified the aspects of her brother’s personality that could make him a successful politician. Recalling his teenage rock concerts, Karina reports: “At every show he would do a kind of striptease, flinging his T-shirt or some other piece of clothing, and I would fight with the screaming fans to recover the clothes.” Years later, when her brother became famous, she noticed “that people saw him as a rock star: they not only wanted to listen to him but also to touch him and have their picture taken with him.” She realised that the key to helping her brother spread his libertarian ideas was to organise events that “not only provided academic content but also made the audience feel passionate and excited”.

Karina’s hand is evident in Milei’s rock-inspired campaign events, which often feel more theatrical than political. Recently he has started wielding a chainsaw, to demonstrate how he plans to tear up the status quo. Such tactics seem to appeal to his young, male-dominated base. In a survey conducted in September by Premise, a research and data company based in San Francisco, for The Economist, 60% of respondents aged 18 to 25 had a favourable or very favourable view of Milei, compared with only 39% of respondents aged over 45. In the same survey, among men aged 18 to 25, Milei’s approval ratings reached 74%, compared with slightly less than half for women of the same age.

“In any other country in the world young people normally tend to be on the left. But here the youth has turned to the liberal or libertarian right in just a few years,” said Maslatón, the former friend. People in their 20s grew up mostly under the left-wing presidencies of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, the husband-and-wife politicians who ruled the country separately between 2003 and 2015 (Cristina is currently Argentina’s vice-president). After the Kirchners, the country was governed by a centre-right administration, and is now run by a centre-left one. Being left-wing in Argentina isn’t rebellious. But becoming a libertarian? That’s how to shock your parents.

Many on the left are unnerved by how popular Milei’s ideas are with working-class voters. Héctor Abel Espinoza, a 32-year-old who lives in a slum called Villa 31 in Buenos Aires, opened a liquor store called Liberty 31 in honour of Liberty Advances. The yellow flag of libertarianism, which features a coiled snake over the motto “Don’t tread on me”, hangs behind the counter.

Espinoza grew up in a small mud house with a tin roof in one of Argentina’s poorest provinces, on the border with Bolivia. His parents, who were street vendors, couldn’t read or write; Espinoza recalls seeing officers kick his mother’s fruit-juice stall down because she didn’t have the proper permits. Later, when he moved to Buenos Aires, he couldn’t find a flat without reams of paperwork he didn’t possess. Like millions of other Argentines, Espinoza learned to hustle on the black market, saving up until he could open his own shop – but he still had to ask a better-off friend from university for help registering the store. For him, these experiences “generated hatred and contempt” towards the state. Milei’s rhetoric and proposal to slash red tape were instantly appealing.

Milei’s support with the working class outside city slums is even more striking: in the primaries, his strongest showing was in some of Argentina’s poorest and most remote provinces. Even if Milei is not elected president, Espinoza said he “has already won” because “he has managed to initiate a discussion that didn’t exist before.”

When I met Milei this September, in a nondescript office building in Buenos Aires, he was disarmingly polite, with an impish air. He was back to being the wonky professor, rattling off names of obscure economists like Hans Hermann-Hoppe and Walter Block, and some better-known ones like Milton Friedman (many times). I caught glimpses of the bonachon, or good guy, too. As if I was the one who had lost 20kg, he repeatedly implored the maid to bring me medialunas, Argentina’s syrup-covered answer to croissants. When, after an hour, I got up to leave, he asked me to stay for another two because he liked chatting with me. He gave me a copy of one of his books, and wrote in dedication: “Keep doing your marvellous work!”

Yet I found our interaction somewhat unsettling as well. In appearance and demeanour, Milei seemed overwhelmed; he answered several of my questions robotically, as if he was looking for cues to play his part. He became most animated when I remarked that his vision for Argentina seemed to have a strong moral component. Raising his voice, he responded “it is absolutely moral!” and claimed that “the state is the institutional manifestation of violence.” When I asked in turn why he’d made insulting remarks about his opponents, he insisted that TV producers had wound him up to improve ratings.

Milei seems to get particularly vexed when asked probing technical questions. I spoke to an adviser who is unconvinced about his boss’s grasp of macroeconomics. Whenever confronted by an analyst who claims it will be hard to dollarise the economy, Milei, said the adviser, will typically provide a complicated-sounding response that does not answer the question. “And you are left scratching your head, like ‘what does he mean?’ But by then has moved on to another subject.”

He has heard that Milei often weeps with nerves. “This is a guy who has not been in politics and all of a sudden he is the leading candidate who says he is going to change Argentina. And he realises that he does not have the ability to sing, dance and play the music.” Rather than delegate to his advisers, some of whom are renowned economists, Milei often doubles down on what he thinks is right.

Doubling down on his instincts may be dangerous for Argentina. In recent weeks, Milei has continued attacking the viability of the peso (“The peso is the currency issued by the Argentine politician and therefore is worth less than excrement,” he recently said on the radio), hastening its decline. Economists worry that his flagship policy of dollarisation carries many risks – not least because the net reserves of Argentina’s central bank are $5bn in the red, and the country cannot borrow dollars easily. Dollarisation would mean exchanging all the pesos in circulation plus those held in banks, which Milei’s team estimates will require between $40bn and $90bn (GDP is $630bn). The policy could represent a quick fix to inflation, but it may not solve the underlying issue of high government spending.

Since Milei’s coalition is mostly a one-man show, he is not expected to get many deputies elected to Argentina’s Congress. This means it might be difficult to implement what he calls his “chainsaw plan” through traditional avenues. In a recent interview, Milei said that if people surround the presidential palace to protest changes he wants to make to welfare policies, “they will have to drag me out dead.” He has also said that he would take some of his proposals to referendum if Congress does not approve them, which would further undermine the country’s weak institutions.

As I left the interview, I couldn’t help but think that the well-mannered Milei bidding me farewell was not the one who would run the country – that Milei owes his fame to the provocative attacks he has made on the status quo. His tendency to get angry with his critics and deflect blame for his offensive behaviour suggests he would not remain a calm or rational decision-maker if challenged by Congress. “One of the things that has made him so popular is that he represents an important segment of society that is angry, and that wants to be represented by someone who is also angry,” said Beker, the university professor. Although Milei may yet lose the election (recent polls show that a more centrist candidate has made inroads by tapping moderate and apolitical voters), it is this version of him who could assume the presidency. If that happens, then Argentina had better brace itself. ■

Ana Lankes is The Economist’s Latin America correspondent

IMAGES: GETTY, EYEVINE, Shutterstock