Milei Wins Mandate for Free-Market Revolution in Argentina's Election | Hacker News Reader

Milei Wins Mandate for Free-Market Revolution in Argentina's Election

wsj.com

That's funny given that the US hurriedly organized a $40 billion lifeline for him after he burned through a $20 billion IMF loan earlier this year.

The article after the 1st 2 paragraphs was pay walled. Archives did not work.

1/3 of seats is a mandate?

A not-horrible alternative:

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/27/argentinas-midterm-election-...

I guess the perception is that the growth of his party can be considered a mandate. But yeah, "mandate" and "free-market revolution" seem to indicate an editorial position.

I think doubling your support to 41% probably counts in a fractured legislature.

A fractured legislature is evidence no one has a mandate. Increased support is notable. I never saw 41% of votes or 1/3 of seats called a mandate before.

In countries with more than two viable parties, a single party getting 41% can be pretty significant.

Significant and mandate are different words with different meanings. The implication I was ignorant of multi party systems was not founded.

I think you have an overly specific idea of what mandate means. It's not a synonym for majority.

Winning 40% in an election with 67.9% turnout isn’t exactly the will of the people here.

It is in a highly proportional multiparty voting system.

If 41% is a mandate I’m sure they would have called 39% a mandate too

It’s about the political optics

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger in their heads

Welcome to non-US countries with more than 2 parties.

It’s not often that we get to see a country peacefully change direction. I wonder what we’ll be saying about Milei in ten years?

They'll probably say mostly the same things the citizens of Ravenholm say about Wallace Breen.

This thread should be merged into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45716844.

No big surprise.

I don't agree with a lot of this guy's politics (especially his bizarre lean into intolerance for sexual identity deviance), but I do respect his willingness to calmly talk about his vision for hours.

I'm headed to Buenos Aires in a couple of weeks here, as I imagine many here are. Planning to play a couple of shows (sorry that the announcement is so late, but it's coming soon). What are must-dos while there, especially with respect to live music?

Agree he’s articulate and charismatic, despite being odd. And whatever the outcomes, it feels more coherent than the people he has faced off with.

Must dos - seek out the food you like and make time for it. There is a lot of great food. I recommend finding the best steak at the price you’re willing to pay.

> but I do respect his willingness to calmly talk about his vision for hours.

He calls the opposition "rats", "mandrills" and scum of the earth and has a clear and objective disdain for poor people. It's amazing how that part continuously gets left out in neoliberal media.

Yeah, I agree that coverage of him is unduly fawning.

We're at a weird time in history where the only people saying things that are reasonable are also saying things that are horrible.

Try some peñas folklóricas.

His views on women:

In November, Argentina was the only country to vote against a UN general assembly resolution to prevent and eliminate violence against women and girls. Two months later, Milei’s administration went further, pledging to strike the aggravating factor of femicide, defined as when a woman dies at the hands of a man on the basis of her gender, from the penal code – a move that drew swift condemnation from human rights groups

Correct choice. Murder shouldn't have different penalties for killing men and women.

Show us meaningful statistics that display equality in killings based specifically on gender.

I feel like you're not going to like where that logic leads if you apply it to other things.

I’m not applying it anywhere but the topic at hand. Prove there’s not a meaningful difference between men killing women and women killing men.

> I’m not applying it anywhere but the topic at hand.

That's the objection to it.

I don't have them and I don't care. It could be 1000:1 and my point would still stand.

Human rights groups have no credibility. They can reliably be found attacking men and all things masculine, like the hard decisions that Milei is taking to create prosperity. If it were up to them Argentina would be in a Peronist dictatorship forever. And the UN assembly has become a joke too. Look at their childish antics, turning escalators and microphones off to annoy Trump. It screams irrelevance and immaturity.

These institutions are scared because the people who work there know they are useless and if the government funding stops there'll be nowhere for them to go. Milei has been cutting people like that off from the spigot. Trump too. They are not unbiased actors.

Milei's "created prosperity" seems to be dead in a ditch (as far as actual Argentines are concerned) and somehow still stealing money from working class US tax payers.

Must have vacío madurado

The Natural History Museum in La Plata, the National Library, Palacio de Aguas Corrientes, San Telmo antique markets, Palacio Barolo, empanadas, alfajores, ice cream, walk down 9 de Julio, dance in a contact improv jam, Teatro Colón, tour the Tigre delta in a boat, Casa Saltshaker, look at graffiti in Palermo near Gorriti and Thames, Teatro Ciego (blind theater, ideally with a MOTAS), go to some protests, Tango Queer, the bullet holes just to the south of the Pink House, choripan on the street outside any train station (if you eat meat), get your phone stolen in La Boca or Once, Recoleta Cemetery, neighborhood cafés, the Thinker in Plaza Congreso, the Jardín Botánico, see a football game, change dollars or Tether on Calle Florida (the moneychangers yell cambio like a Pokemon), drink yerba mate with friends in Parque Centenario, go to a telo with a friend or MOTAS, I don't know, I can't think of much.

I liked that, a rare objective description of a city, with all the entertainment (and since the middel of the trip you know your hands will be free :))

(There's a lot of live music stuff, but it changes all the time, so I don't know what to recommend.)

Definitely check out Open Folk for weekly shows (some folk but a very eclectic mix so don't overindex on the name).

And hit up La Viruta on Saturday nights (after midnight) for amazing live tango music.

The thing that a lot of western countries should keep in mind about Milei is that he promised a lot of pain before the prosperity would come...and he did it. Inflation continued for 6 months into his presidency, and then it dropped to levels that haven't been seen for almost a decade. Poverty rates rose for almost a year, but then dropped well below what it was before he took office. GDP dropped for a year, but then rebounded pretty spectacularly. This is more than a year of non-stop naysaying from people who used those things as proof that he was wrong, only to be silenced when he turned out to be right. He hasn't been shy about still needing more help, seeking funding from the IMF and the US, but he has at least proven that what he is doing is working.

I have a million reasons to not like Milei, but he is successfully pulling off something that almost no politician ever does without getting voted out first. Anybody who promises pain has to deal with the constant criticism that comes with that pain, and almost nobody can survive that hit to their popularity. Even if you disagree with how he did it, you have to at least admire that he did what he said he would do.

I think a lot of American liberals have a hatred of him because he's right wing, but we should actually be (at least partially) praising him and pointing out his successes have come from being the exact opposite of Trump on issues like tariffs and deficits.

GDP is still dropping. We just had our third consecutive quarter of negative GDP growth.

Edit: I can't find evidence that this is true, and I think I might have been tricked. But growth is at best quite anemic. See longer comment below.

GDP is not always a useful metric. An old economics joke:

Two economists are walking in a forest when they come across a pile of shit.

The first economist says to the other “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The second economist takes the $100 and eats the pile of shit.

They continue walking until they come across a second pile of shit. The second economist turns to the first and says “I’ll pay you $100 to eat that pile of shit.” The first economist takes the $100 and eats a pile of shit.

Walking a little more, the first economist looks at the second and says, "You know, I gave you $100 to eat shit, then you gave me back the same $100 to eat shit. I can't help but feel like we both just ate shit for nothing."

"That's not true", responded the second economist. "We increased the GDP by $200!"

It's not, but it's the metric the person I replied to was using.

This sounds like a Russian joke, and like many Russian jokes, it contains a great deal of truth.

What data are you looking at? I only see yoy growth

There's no contradiction between year-over-year growth and nine months of economic decline; year-over-year figures also average in the three months before those nine. Six months, if you are looking at YoY figures for June.

However, I may have been tricked. https://www.indec.gob.ar/uploads/informesdeprensa/pib_09_250... says the official statistic is that the de-seasonalized GDP grew 0.9% in the first quarter and fell 0.1% in the second quarter, so even if the third quarter is down (the official statistics aren't out yet) it's only the second consecutive quarter of negative growth on a cyclically adjusted basis.

I can't find the non-cyclically-adjusted data.

0.8% growth for the first half of the year is very far from "rebound[ing] pretty spectacularly" but it's no recession. But it all depends on whether the 3Q results are -0.9% or +0.9%. Maybe they'll release the report now that the election is over.

Articles like https://www.infobae.com/economia/2025/09/17/la-probabilidad-... are about near-future predictions, not established facts.

Just to clarify, that's an increase of 0.8%, not annualized 0.8% growth. Annualized it would be 1.6%, which is below the long-run post-Industrial-Revolution average of around 3%, but far from the immediate catastrophe Fernandez and his economy minister Massa had perpetrated before Milei came to power.

For the very simple reasons I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45719672 it looks to me like Milei is further hollowing out the Argentine economy. I'm no professor of economics, so my understanding of these issues is highly oversimplified, so I could be wrong.

> I think a lot of American liberals have a hatred of him because he's right wing, but we should actually be (at least partially) praising him and pointing out his successes have come from being the exact opposite of Trump on issues like tariffs and deficits.

No liberal (of which I am), should really have looked at the economic policies they had prior to Milei and think they were a good idea. Leftist populism is no better than right populism. Milei may act like a populist politician, but if his policies are sound (I don't know enough to comment) -- then kudos to him.

I haven't been able to defeat the paywall here, but what mandate and what revolution, and what is so free market about taking in 20 to 40 billion from the US in exchange for a promise to push Chinese business interests out of the country? At least the Chinese were building stuff in Argentina. The US will just hold stuff hostage like Paul Singer.

Is it good for the environment to build stuff? I'm always confused when it's good to build stuff or not build stuff.

Isn’t that literally free market given what you’re saying is true?

I don't think the US gov interfering in the elections of other countries with a massive lake of cash is very 'free market'. The US has a decades long history of promoting neo-liberal policies in Argentina ( though some economists might argue that it actually started in Argentina and migrated to America ). If this is 'free market', I don't think the word has any meaning anymore.

There's also a non zero chance that Trump will get distracted or changes his mind and it the Bailout just doesn't happen.

I think building stuff is fine. The Chinese foreign policy seems to be building stuff in other countries, and using the new infra as leverage to promote Chinese interests in the future.

Lately the US just seems to threaten countries with Tactical bombing, no building infra.

Millei’s party won by less than 1 percent. Landslide?

It was a legislative election, Milei's party won 26 new seats between senators and deputies, which compared against the next most popular party (peronists) which had a net loss of 18 seats, landslide seems appropriate.

It's possible if his movement is successful in AG that it may change the direction of politics in the southern cone from one cozying up to ne'er-do-well socialism to pro-market economies that uplift whole economies. It's also possible it fails and the affair with socialism continues and continues to have southern cone economies under-perform. We shall see.

The south-americans are surprisingly patient. The Argentinians elected Peronists for decades with the unsurprising outcome of decline and ultimately high inflation.

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