>>2850182You’re arguing against a position I didn’t actually take.
I never claimed Milei had solved Argentina’s structural problems or that living standards had suddenly become good. Argentina is still a poor, highly unequal country with a long history of boom-and-bust cycles, chronic inflation, IMF dependence and institutional weakness. Those problems predate Milei by decades.
My point was much narrower: compared to the Fernández administration, inflation has fallen dramatically, and even critics generally acknowledge that. Whether that stabilization proves durable—or whether it simply comes at too high a social cost—is the real debate.
Likewise, poverty is more contested than you’re making it out to be. Official figures show a decline after the initial shock, while many NGOs and economists argue that the methodology understates hardship because purchasing power, housing costs and food insecurity remain severe. Those aren’t mutually exclusive observations.
As for Peronism, I think you’re treating seventy years of very different governments as one coherent project. Perón in the late 1940s isn’t Menem in the 1990s, isn’t the Kirchners, isn’t Alberto Fernández. There were periods of successful industrialization and rising living standards, but also periods of fiscal mismanagement, inflation, clientelism and repeated debt crises. Calling the entire tradition either a “golden age” or an unmitigated disaster oversimplifies Argentine history.
I also don’t buy the idea that every positive macroeconomic indicator can simply be dismissed as fake because Milei is in office. If inflation falls, that’s real. If real wages fall, that’s also real. If manufacturing contracts, that’s real too. We should be able to acknowledge all three simultaneously instead of accepting whichever statistics fit our preferred narrative.
Ultimately, I think it’s too early to declare either victory or catastrophe. Argentina has looked like it was “finally fixed” before, only to collapse again a few years later. If Milei’s reforms survive the next external shock and produce sustained increases in real wages, investment and productivity, then he’ll have a stronger case. If they don’t, then this will just be another chapter in Argentina’s recurring cycle.