The business sector is traditionally risk averse in political terms. Over the last several weeks, Argentina’s “suits” have been forced to reckon with a situation of increased uncertainty amidst their incredulity at Juntos por el Cambio’s electoral performance, especially Buenos Aires City Mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, their favorite. For many of them even the pan-Peronist coalition candidate, Economy Minister Sergio Massa, represented a sort of “rational” continuity with which they could cope with. Instead, they got the “Black Swan” scenario of Javier Milei, the ultra-libertarian economist who promises to burn the Central Bank and overhaul the state and whose vice-presidential candidate comes as close to denying the human rights violations of the last military dictatorship as anyone aspiring to the Presidency of the Senate could be.
Nothing farther from political correctness appears possible within the Argentine political ecosystem, fuelling the panic of the “círculo rojo” (or group of influential decision makers with real firepower). What they are all thinking, but are not willing to say publicly, is that they believe a Milei administration would be marked by a level of institutional instability so great that it would quickly lead to a situation of social unrest. Paralyzed by their fear and lack of comprehension of the “Milei phenomenon,” they look forward with a sense of inevitability to a hectic 2024 when the macroeconomic variables are expected to go haywire to the tune of the libertarian economist’s utopian agenda that includes his “chainsaw plan” to hack 13 percentage points off public expenditure and the intention of dollarizing the economy, among others. It is unclear how long Milei and his associates would last in the Casa Rosada, they suggest. While they can’t really say this out loud, they look at the other electoral contenders, especially Patricia Bullrich, as incapable of putting a dent on Milei’s lead
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