Argentine President Javier Milei led a military parade on Tuesday aboard a tank and recalled 19th-century patriots as an example of persistence in the face of adversity at a time when faith in the success of his economic plan is beginning to show cracks.
During the celebrations for Independence Day, the president sought to give signs of strength by signing a political pact with opposition governors and then called a crowd of supporters to a military parade through the streets of Buenos Aires.
While Milei, a libertarian economist, has managed to slow inflation and make a sharp cut in public spending in six months, the downside has been a deepening of the inherited economic recession, with a 5.1% drop in the Gross Domestic Product and an increase in unemployment to 7.7% in the first quarter of this year.
In the last week, markets showed signs of distrust regarding the direction of the economic plan and the dollar reached its highest level in the informal market, while bonds suffered falls.
“Argentina is at a turning point. Breaking points in the history of a nation are not moments of peace and tranquility, they are moments of difficulty and conflict where everything seems to be going uphill,” said the president during a speech he gave in the early hours of Tuesday from the historic Casa de Tucumán, where the independence of the South American country was signed on July 9, 1816.
Using the national holiday as an excuse, Milei called on governors and former presidents of various political parties to sign the so-called May Pact, a foundational text that includes 10 points, including the inviolability of private property, fiscal balance, reduction of public spending, modernization of education, and tax, labor and pension reforms.
“The great Argentine history is marked by the passing of generations of patriots. They are the generations of those we all learned from in textbooks when we were children,” Milei stressed and called for “embracing again, for the first time in 100 years, the ideas that our national heroes embraced, the ideas that transformed a country of barbarians into a world power in a matter of a few decades.”
The ruling party La Libertad Avanza does not govern any of the country’s 24 districts, so 18 governors who belong to provincial parties or opposition forces described as “dialoguists” responded to the call.
Five governors aligned with former center-left president Cristina Fernández (2007-2015) did not support the initiative, including Axel Kicillof of the province of Buenos Aires, the largest district in the country.
Milei had also invited former presidents of all political stripes, but only the Peronist Adolfo Rodríguez Saá, who presided over the country for a week in 2001, and the conservative Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) participated.
“I know that many Argentines are tired and feel that we have spent too much effort in the service of nothing in recent years and that trying to get ahead in Argentina sometimes feels like carrying the stone of Sisyphus,” Milei said. “But I tell you, we know that a different Argentina is impossible by doing the same thing as always and we will not stop until we change the roots of the ills that afflict our country.”
Milei then returned to Buenos Aires to attend a military parade on one of the main avenues of the Argentine capital. This tradition was interrupted during the previous center-left government of Alberto Fernández (2019-2023).
The president, accompanied by his vice-president Victoria Villarruel, participated in the tour aboard a military tank, a very unusual sight in a country where most of the leaders have distanced themselves from the Armed Forces after the return of democracy due to the wounds left by the last dictatorship (1976-1983).
Exultant, Milei greeted her followers and repeatedly shouted the slogan of her presidential campaign: “Long live freedom, damn it.”
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