For a few months, our president was “the ‘golden boy’ of global politics”, said Agustino Fontevecchia in the Buenos Aires Times . An eccentric former TV pundit and devotee of the free market who owns five cloned dogs named after monetarist economists, Javier Milei is beloved by right-wingers for taking a “chainsaw” to government spending and regulation.

Scenting blood

Elon Musk has lauded him as a “beacon of hope”; Kemi Badenoch has held him up as the “template” for all conservative leaders. And for a while, his highly controversial economic blueprint “appeared to be working”: since his election in 2023, Argentina’s inflation has dropped from 211% to 43%, and in January, the country posted a fiscal surplus for the first time in 14 years.

But now “the first anarcho-capitalist presi

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