Fall of the chainsaw economist

Argentina's president, once celebrated for slashing budgets, now risks political and economic humiliation

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Before Javier Milei became president of Argentina, a clip of him theatrically ripping up government ministries while shouting “Afuera!” (“Out!” in Argentine slang) went viral. Now, less than two years later, he risks suffering the same fate.

The libertarian firebrand’s promise to hack away at the bloated Latin American state won him global notoriety and political power. But today his government is on life support, kept alive only by a last-minute foreign currency lifeline from Washington to prop up the peso.

The speed of Milei’s humbling has been astonishing, even by the roller-coaster standards of Argentinian politics.

Just months ago, he was celebrated as a libertarian hero who had somehow tamed Argentina's rampant and chronic inflation. To his admirers on the global populist right, he was the “chainsaw economist” who proved that radical austerity could revive a dying economy.

His rise to far-right superstardom brought bizarre spectacles of political devotion. A few weeks after US President Donald Trump's return to office, Milei gave a chainsaw to Elon Musk, who went on to brandish it at a rally in a similarly deranged manner.

At the time, Milei’s fiscal shock therapy — slashing budgets, firing thousands of civil servants and ending central bank financing of deficits that had caused the runaway inflation had cut inflation from more than 160% in 2023 to about 30%. In Argentina, where economic collapse has been routine for generations, this seemed miraculous.