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Soriek  5mo ago (text post)   1815 thread views

Transnational Thanksgiving (comes one day early)

Posting this a day early because I won’t be around tomorrow.

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum lives in or might be interested in. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Argentina

Javier Milei surprised the world not just by winning the Argentinian election, but by beating Economy Minister Sergio Massa by a commanding 12 points. I assume this now means he is assuredly the first elected anarchist-capitalist head of state in history. While the world has been paying more and more attention to his antics in the past month, the last few days have seen a wave of “who the heck is this guy?” Pictures of his cosplay past have come up alongside his juicier quotes, and photos of his fans wearing Chainsaw Man face masks at his rally.

So what happens now? I don’t think anyone knows but in my opinion, probably not much? Milei has a minority in Congress, which means he doesn’t have a mandate to push any of his incredibly ambitious reforms through. Libertad Avanza will work together with some members of Juntos por el Cambio, the center right party that endorsed him after the runoff, but many of their members have said they have no interest dealing with Melei at all. Even with all of their seats together (LA 35 + JxC 31) they would only have a two seat majority in the Chamber of Deputies. And it seems very unlikely they’ll be able to get anywhere near that much support from JxC.

He has promised to privatize as much of the Federal Branch as he can, which supposedly excludes the sizable Health and Education Ministries because they apparently operate at the provincial level. What remains at the federal level will be shrunk from 18 down to 8. Does he have the power to do all this without input from the legislative branch? It’s not really clear to me. Interested to hear if anyone else understands the situation better.

If Argentina remains out of the scope of man or deity to fix, I welcome his tenure just so that it can be dysfunctional in novel and interesting ways!

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