At first glance, Argentina’s president Javier Milei looks more like a rock icon than a head of state. The wild hair, the sideburns, the leather jacket, the profanity on the verge of scandal, and the endless chainsaw memes — an image that, in almost any other country, would amount to political suicide.

Yet this “rocker with a chainsaw” became the first leader in two decades to halt inflation in a country where prices were rising faster than political promises.

Argentina elected him in 2023, and then doubled down in October 2025, handing parliamentary control to his party.

Twenty Years of Decay

Look at the wider picture, and Argentina stops being an exception. The political pendulum across the world is swinging wildly — from far-right to radical left, from Milei in Buenos Aires to Zohran Mamdani in New York. Two opposite figures, but driven by the same logic: societies no longer choose experience, status, or pedigree. They choose people who feel real, even if that authenticity looks like chaos.

Political leadership itself is changing. Voters want fewer professionals and more characters. And Argentina became the first country where this trend didn’t just surface — it won.

For two decades the country lived in a state of chronic self-deception. Peronism, once a promise of social solidarity and dignity, had mutated into a system of clientelism and theft. The “bad left” ran the country as a private cashbox: signing predatory deals with dictators, borrowing from Venezuela at triple interest just to avoid IMF oversight, cozying up to Putin and Maduro while the state slid into ruin.

In 2020, the government signed a contract for Russia’s Sputnik vaccine — a contract Moscow failed to deliver on. Thousands died waiting for Pfizer. Corruption and ideological blindness turned lethal. Former president Cristina Kirchner received a six-year sentence for embezzlement of half a billion dollars, yet her political clan remained in parliament.

By then, the economy was wreckage. A populist president with a two-percent approval rating was hosting parties at the presidential residence during lockdown, while his finance minister plugged budget holes with the printing press. In just six months, the state issued money worth 15% of GDP. Inflation hit 1–1.5% per day — roughly four thousand percent annually. At the same time, the government kept dog trainers, dietitians and stylists for the first lady, and tens of thousands of party activists on the public payroll, while millions of children weren’t eating daily.

By 2023, Argentina reached a point where “normal life” was no longer possible. And that was the moment a man with a chainsaw stepped onto the stage.

The Rise of an Outsider

When a system starts to crack, societies tend to look for someone from the outside. In Argentina, that person was Javier Milei — an economist, talk-show regular, rock musician with a PhD, and a man with a volatile speaking style. He entered politics not as a reformer, but as a symptom: the embodiment of exhaustion, anger, and total distrust toward the old parties.

Milei never hid his contempt for bureaucracy. He spoke to people not like a politician, but like a blunt neighbor at the kitchen table. His lines were rough but precise. He didn’t promise miracles; he said, “We’re living beyond our means. Someone has to turn off the printing press.” That directness worked. After twenty years of lies and looting by the political elite, a man who had never once lied in public office looked almost saintly.

He won the presidency in 2023 but entered office without real parliamentary support: his party controlled barely a third of half the lower house. Anyone else would have drowned in the system. Milei chose another path: speaking directly to voters and turning parliament into his main antagonist. Every failed reform became an argument against the old order, and every day he explained to the public who exactly was blocking change.

His economic strategy was ruthless: cutting public spending, privatizing loss-making state companies, firing thousands of bureaucrats, and shutting down the printing press. By mid-2025, the results were clear: inflation fell to 2% per month, the budget recorded its first primary surplus of 2% of GDP in decades, the peso stabilized at 1,200–1,400 per dollar, poverty dropped from 55% to 31.6%, and the national debt shrank by roughly $50 billion.

Milei proved that in 21st-century politics, an outsider with a clear diagnosis can outperform an entire cohort of “experienced” officials. He simply stopped playing by their rules.

Playing the Long Game: 2023–2025

The first two years of his presidency became a test of endurance. A parliament where Milei lacked a majority blocked every attempt at reform. The opposition pushed through spending bills purely to sabotage fiscal discipline. The media predicted collapse daily. But instead of panicking, Milei chose a cold, deliberate strategy: explaining events directly to voters and turning every setback into a lesson in political anatomy.

He called things by their names: not “institutional resistance” but “thieves and parasites protecting their feeding trough.” And it worked. His press conferences drew millions of views, and his approval ratings didn’t fall. More than that: people saw he wasn’t backing down, and gradually began to view parliament as the main source of corruption.

By 2025, the outcome was unmistakable. The economy stabilized, the peso stopped collapsing, budget revenues grew, and international partners started treating Argentina as a reliable actor again. The country reversed its foreign policy direction: away from alliances with Venezuela, Russia, and Iran toward partnerships with the United States, Israel, Italy, and other Western democracies.

Milei’s message in the 2025 elections was direct. He pointed to falling inflation, a primary surplus, and shrinking poverty, and asked voters to give him enough seats to finish the job. The opposition mocked his strategy, failing to see how trapped they had become in their own inertia.

When his party secured a third of parliament in October 2025, the meaning was clear: Milei hadn’t just won an election. He had won time. He proved that even without the support of the old elite, a country can hold course if reforms deliver and trust with voters remains direct.

The 2025 Elections and the Reversal

By the 2025 elections, the country had reached a state of political asymmetry. Milei had reforms, a primary surplus, sharply reduced inflation, and poverty falling from 55% to 31.6%. The opposition had nothing: no new faces, no new ideas, not even a respectable story about its own past.

The left looked as if assembled from criminal case files. Half its senior officials were under investigation; the party leader was serving a seven-year sentence. Their only platform was “Stop Milei.” No plan, no economics, no explanation of how.

Then came a symbolic blow. Twenty-four hours before the vote, one of the key Peronist provinces was hit by a flood. Streets washed out, cars floating, children being rescued from the water. Local authorities — running the region for six years on kickbacks — stood exposed. People simply didn’t show up at the polls.

The opposition celebrated a victory in local by-elections — without checking who voted. It turned out to be one and a half million foreign residents, allowed to elect municipal authorities but not permitted to vote federally. Their “win” meant nothing.

Milei, meanwhile, went to voters with dry numbers and a simple message: the reforms were working. He needed a stronger hand in parliament to push them further. His 54% in 2023 showed trust. The results of 2025 consolidated power: his party secured a third of parliament, enough to veto harmful bills, block sabotage, and push reforms through decrees.

This wasn’t just a comeback. It was the end of the Peronist era — a political earthquake after which the old Argentina no longer exists. Milei didn’t win with emotion or theatrics, but with results, delivered across two difficult years.

Global Contrast: When a System Breaks — and When It Breaks You

It’s easy to view Milei’s rise as Latin American exoticism: chaos, crises, temperament. But that’s an illusion. This isn’t exotic — it’s a mirror. And it’s particularly painful if you’ve lived in Russia.

For twenty-five years in Russia, I watched the same mix of stagnation, nepotism, and erased civic agency, sealed under the lid of “stability.” The same faces, the same friends-and-relatives networks in power, the same logic of the state as a private shop. People grew tired — economically and emotionally — but fatigue never turned into action; it froze into silence.

The economic decline was systemic, as in late-stage Argentina. But in Russia, it was masked by oil rents and television fog. The war with Ukraine finished what had begun a decade earlier: it devoured the country’s future, its sense of meaning, and the people who might have built something new. No breakthroughs, no new industries — just a fading empire clinging to myths while sectors collapsed.

Corruption was another mirror. In Argentina, it was loud and chaotic. In Russia, it is silent, precise, professional. Argentina maintained at least an illusion of political turnover. Russia didn’t. The system crushes any desire for change because change threatens the system itself.

And here lies the difference. Argentina unraveled because society was allowed to unravel. Russia has spent twenty-five years making sure society never gets that chance. Argentines could say: “We’ve had enough.” In Russia, that phrase became a luxury — people either fear saying it or have forgotten how.

This is why Argentina got Milei, and Russia did not.

The Global Phenomenon: Why Milei Is Not an Exception but a Sign of the Times

What happened in Argentina isn’t a system failure — it’s a new system. Milei became the first politician to embody what is happening now in the United States, Europe, and Asia: voters no longer trust professional politicians. They don’t want moderation or experience. They want an authentic wrecking ball — someone who calls things by their names and refuses to pretend he’s managing a complex machine.

At one pole: Milei, the far-right libertarian with his chainsaw. At the other: Zohran Mamdani in New York, a Muslim socialist who defeated the Democratic establishment. One shouts about market freedom, the other about justice and redistribution.

This isn’t polarity. It’s the same impulse: “Give us a real person, not a mannequin of power.”

What used to be considered political madness — memes, theatrics, raw emotion, anti-elitism — is becoming the new normal. A leader no longer needs to be a strategist. He needs to resemble the people who elect him: tough, honest, emotional. Someone chosen not for pedigree, but for character.

Argentina simply got there first. The country collapsed faster than others and shifted into this new political mode earlier. What looks today like a “Latin American quirk” will, in five years, be standard in half of Western democracies: politics as performance, as emotion, as exposed nerve.

Milei isn’t an Argentine anomaly. He is the demo version of the world’s political future — without filters and without diplomatic gloss.

Risks and Legacy: Can a Destroyer Become a Builder?

Tearing down a rotten system is cathartic. Argentina got that release: the chainsaw, the shock therapy, the dismantling of corrupt networks, the shutdown of the printing press. But revolutions always reach a point where the adrenaline fades, and the question becomes what to build afterward.

This is where Milei faces his hardest test. His legitimacy rests on honesty, anger, and economic clarity. But that alone can’t rebuild institutions, and Argentina’s institutions are scorched — as damaged as public trust itself.

Move too fast, and the remaining social infrastructure cracks. Move too slowly, and the old guard returns. Push too hard, and the system overloads. Go too soft, and you lose the voters who gave you their last shard of hope.

And Milei himself remains a leader with an outsized personality. His strengths can become a governing model only if he’s willing to hand some power back to the very institutions he spent two years dismantling. That’s the paradox: for the project to survive, he must eventually step back.

There is another risk. The new political archetype — emotional, raw, anti-elite — binds the country to the leader’s image. As long as he remains a hero, the model holds. If the economy falters or reforms stall, the same anger that brought him to power may turn against him.

Milei’s future hinges not only on economic success. It depends on whether he can transform from a man who cuts into a man who builds.

If he succeeds, Argentina might become the first successful case of anti-establishment liberalism.
If he fails, it will become a warning: destruction without institutional architecture leads back to chaos.