It’s difficult to be as bad as Bolsonaro, but Milei has tried – 10/21/2023 – Celso Rocha de Barros

Argentina goes to the polls this Sunday to elect its new president. The first place in the polls is Javier Milei, sometimes called the “Argentine Bolsonaro”. The Bolsonaro clan, in fact, supports Milei enthusiastically.

You have to be careful when saying that someone is the Bolsonaro of another country. Very few things in the world are as bad as Jair Bolsonaro.

Thanks to Bolsonaro, during a few months of 2021 Brazil had a third of the world’s Covid-19 deaths, more than ten times our proportion of the world’s population (2.8%). According to calculations by epidemiologist Pedro Hallal, the refusal of vaccine offers by the Bolsonaro government caused, between January and June 2021 alone, 95 thousand deaths.

Bolsonaro also dismantled the mechanisms to combat corruption in Brazil and allowed congressmen to present secret amendments to the Budget (which is why he was not impeached). He carried out at least two coup attempts. The first, on September 7, 2021, when he declared that he would no longer obey the Federal Supreme Court. And another one right after his defeat last year. Last week, a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry named the former president as the intellectual mastermind behind the destruction of Praça dos Três Poderes on January 8, the culmination of a coup wave that followed the results of the elections. A terrorist who had held a position in the Bolsonaro government tried to blow up Brasília airport on Christmas Eve 2022.

In other words, it is not enough to be conservative, populist, or even the radical version of any of these things, to be “the Bolsonaro” of your country. Whoever wants the title must be comparable, not to other statesmen, but to natural catastrophes and biblical plagues.

Although he has already lied about the number of people missing during the dictatorship, Milei’s CV as a fascist is much more modest than that of Bolsonaro, a former soldier who had already tried to blow up his own barracks. Milei’s fascism deficit is only partially covered by his vice-presidential candidate, Victoria Villarruel, who has historical links with the soldiers imprisoned for crimes during the Argentine dictatorship and even visited former dictator Jorge Videla.

But Milei’s economic program is considerably worse than Bolsonaro’s. Jair always admitted that he was completely ignorant on the subject. The Argentine candidate seems stuck at that peak of stupidity in which the individual knows enough to have strong convictions, but not enough to stop being stupid: he defends abolishing the Central Bank, dollarizing the economy and eliminating public bodies whose functioning, obviously, does not understands.

Milei’s defenders argue that, if elected, he will have to moderate these proposals, and will end up governing like a “normal” right-winger, just a little more “libertarian”.

It’s possible. But it is also possible that the clash of his proposals with the institutions highlights in Milei the authoritarian potential that his vice president, his Brazilian support and the energy of his populist explosion can bring.

I hope that Argentines do not accept taking this risk, or that Javier, if elected, can be completely different from Jair. What Brazilians can say to Argentines at this moment is: if it’s like here, it will be worse than anything you’ve ever seen. And yes, we had already seen a lot too.

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