If you are a normal Irish citizen who gets your news from normal Irish news outlets, then it is a racing certainty that you will not have heard the name of Argentina’s new president – Javier Milei – without also having heard him described, directly or indirectly, as “far right”.
You probably will not have heard, by contrast, that when asked what country he wanted the Argentinian economy to most resemble, he said: “Ireland”.
There’s a reason you won’t have heard that: It might be a little embarrassing for some journalists who simultaneously think that Ireland is a paragon of virtue and that the new Argentinian president is an extremist to hear that the same extremist wants to be more like them.
Some of Milei’s proposals you may have heard of: He wants, for example, for Argentina to abandon the peso and adopt the US dollar as its currency. This plan may be difficult to implement, since Argentina would have to buy the necessary dollars, but it is far from insane. Inflation is running at 140% in Argentina, and inflation is, of course, the reduction in value of the money in your pocket. If a magic wand could be waved, and the dollar adopted in the morning, the inflation problem would be fixed overnight – since the US dollar’s inflation is determined by the US economy, not the Argentinian one.
There is a difference between a plan that is difficult to adopt, and a plan which is insane. Milei’s dollar plan is the former, not the latter.
On more mundane matters, we were sternly warned by the Irish Times during the week that Milei was somebody who played down the crimes of the Argentinian Junta which ruled that country and “disappeared” thousands of Argentinians during its rule in the early 1980s. This is indeed a concern – but are we in Ireland in any position to lecture, when the party most likely to form the next Government plays down the crimes of a terrorist organisation that murdered thousands on this island during the same period? If voters in Ireland do not care about that – and by all accounts they do not – are we really to judge the Argentinians for taking a similar view?
But of course, the Argentinian Junta was of the right, and the IRA was of the left. So in the eyes of many in our media, they simply are not the same. It is that simple, and you should never forget it.
More to the point, if you actually listen to Milei, he does sound like somebody from the 1980s – but not an Argentinian. Give him a blue dress and a handbag, and one might here be listening to the first woman Prime Minister of the United Kingdom:
The most lucid 3 minutes from a politician that I have ever seen. pic.twitter.com/sWPBrMZWdA
— Max Meyer (@mualphaxi) November 20, 2023
The idea he espouses above – that socialism has failed, and that many modern institutions are hopelessly dominated by the left – is not “far right”. It is, in fact, bog standard basic conservative thought spoken unapologetically.
It is also, it should be noted, largely true. In Ireland, for example, tens of billions in cash is directed multi-annually at unproductive sectors of the economy in order to subsidise an NGO sector that exists almost entirely to lobby for left wing policies on everything ranging from alcohol pricing to housing and on to immigration and transgender rights. That “march through the institutions” to which he refers is as real here as it is in South America. And many of the problems, though more pronounced in Argentina, are the same.
Milei may well fail. Politicians fail for all sorts of reasons. For example, he is reputed to have a short temper. He is also facing into a situation where his opponents retain large majorities of the congress. Some of his reforms to the workforce and welfare will sprout significant opposition, because depriving people of a privileged position in society is never popular.
If he should fail, he will receive zero understanding in the western media – even as that same western media makes endless excuses for the failures and corruption of his next door neighbour in South America, President Lula of Brazil. Milei is of the right, after all, and Lula of the left. As mentioned above, the media does not, and will never, treat them the same.
But having a radical programme and a convinced belief in an ideology does not make one extremist. It simply makes one an extremist relative to the people describing you as such.
When the Irish media describes Milei as a far right extremist for espousing policies as simple as spending cuts and tax cuts, what they are saying is “those policies are extreme to us and we could never countenance them here”.
It should also be noted that this is not new, and is part of a pattern: When the Irish media describe a foreign politician as “far right”, what they mean is “we do not like them”. Readers might remember, for example, the terror which greeted the election of Giorgia Meloni in Italy. There, a “far right” Government has made only moderate changes, and largely left Italian society intact. The same is true of “far right” Governments in Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere.
At some point Irish people might start to wonder: If all these far right people keep getting elected, and their societies seem to do okay, are they really as dangerous as the Irish Times and company keep telling us that they are?