With much wailing and gnashing of teeth from its ‘useless political caste,’ as he calls them, Javier Milei will be inaugurated as president of Argentina on Sunday 10 December.

The consternation of the elite is hardly surprising. Milei has promised in the bluntest language to ‘end the privileges of politicians and parasites’.

Describing himself as the outsider’s outsider, Milei has translated the explosive truths of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman from scholarly prose into language that is both vulgar and biblical.

‘I didn’t come here to guide lambs but to awaken lions,’ he says to roars of approval.

As with Trump in 2016 and Brexit, Milei’s victory was not predicted by opinion polls but with 40 per cent of people and 60 per cent of children living in poverty, the economy crumbling under the weight of government debt, and the cost of living skyrocketing to 30-year highs, Milei surfed into office on a tsunami of discontent. Polls predicted a tight contest, but it wasn’t even close. He won 56 per cent of the vote; more than any other president in Argentine history.

For Peronistas, it was time to cry. Having won 10 of the 14 presidential elections in which they competed since 1946, losing was a disagreeable novelty but claims that Milei is a dangerous populist ring hollow.

Peronism is left-wing populism personified promising high wages, high pensions, and full employment. Instead, a cosy cabal of trade unions, heavily-protected state-owned enterprises, crony capitalists, and the leftist governing class, have repeatedly enriched themselves and impoverished the country.

From the 1970s to 1990, there were eight currency crises and hyperinflation averaged 325 per cent annually peaking at 5,000 per cent in 1989. It was Carlos Menem, president for a decade from 1989 who pegged the peso to the US dollar cutting inflation to single digits by 1993 and zero by 1995. GDP grew between 6-8 per cent per annum until 1998 driven by a dramatic growth in international trade.

Milei is a fan of Menem and will adopt much of his agenda. He has promised to take a chainsaw to public spending and with inflation running at 143 per cent it’s not a moment too soon.

In a viral video clip, Milei said he would reduce the number of government ministries to eight yelling ‘Afuera!’ (Out!) each time he ripped a post-it note off a wall and read out the name of the woke, make-work ministry that he plans to abolish such as the Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity.

Milei has also promised to privatise everything in the public sector that he can including state-owned media which he described as ‘a covert ministry of propaganda’.

‘If printing money could end poverty, printing diplomas could end stupidity,’ says Milei, promising to ‘scrap the peso’ which he colourfully said was worth ‘less than excrement’ and ‘blow up’ the central bank.

This policy of dollarisation is intended to replace Menem’s convertible currency but unfortunately, Milei is likely to encounter similar problems to Menem since the dollar fluctuates according to US economic conditions not those in Argentina.

What Argentina needs is a central bank committed to controlling the money supply to keep inflation within a narrow band of 2-3 per cent but is that possible in a country with Argentina’s history? Milei thinks not. He says the only way to reform a state bank is to abolish it.

Milei has been compared to US President Ronald Reagan, also a fan of Hayek, but as Daniel Raisbeck – a policy analyst on Latin America at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity – indicates, the roots of classical liberalism run deep in Argentina. From the 1860s to 1916, the country experienced a golden age with prodigious economic growth driven by the export of agricultural goods. It rivalled Australia but its success was based on the ideas of Juan Bautista Alberdi, an Argentine classical liberal who championed constitutional federalism, economic freedom, and free immigration.

On the eve of the first world war, Argentina was one of the ten wealthiest countries in the world on a per capita basis but sadly, thereafter and for most of the 20th century, it lurched between Peronism and military dictatorships suffering political instability and steep economic decline.

Milei is an economist by training yet anything but dismal. Like a character out of a Latin American magical realism novel, he consults his beloved but deceased English mastiff through a medium.

Milei named the dog after a character created by pulp fiction writer Robert E. Howard in 1932 who remembers a past life as a humorous, smart, combative, black-haired barbarian called Conan.

Does life imitate art or does art imitate life? Who knows? Milei says he and Conan first met at the Colosseum 2,000 years ago when he was a gladiator and Conan was a lion. Apparently, they didn’t fight because they were destined to join forces in the 2023 election campaign.

Conan gave Milei the mission of becoming president and permission to clone five ‘kids with four paws’ whom Milei named after his beloved canine and his economic heroes – Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, and Murray Rothbard.

Milei’s hounds are enormously popular. Ron Gillespie, who runs PerPETuate, the genetic preservation company that cloned Conan said of the dynamic duo, ‘I don’t have a vote in the Argentine election, but I do have five dogs in the race.’’

Milei is widely described as El Loco – the madman – or El Peluca – the wig – because of his wild dark hair which has been likened to the undisciplined mops of Boris Johnson, Geert Wilders and Donald Trump.

Like Trump, Milei has promised to make Argentina great again and Trump applauded Milei’s victory but Milei is no fan of tariffs and protectionism, a policy championed by Peron that destroyed much of Argentina’s international competitiveness.

Instead, Milei is a ‘minarchist’, an anarcho-capitalist like his hero Rothbard who reluctantly accepts that a minimalist state is needed at least for law enforcement and defence.

Milei has dressed up as his alter ego General AnCap, an Anarcho-Capitalist who wears a mask and carries a trident and was recorded at a cosplay festival saying, ‘I come from Liberty land where no one pays taxes. My mission is to kick the ass of Keynesians.’

His detractors imagine that these antics discredit Milei. In fact, they endear him to his legions of fans who find crackpot climate change theories, tyrannical Covid policies, globalist Keynesian prescriptions, and Malthusians bent on destroying agriculture, the economy, and the freedom of ordinary people far more disturbing. Their greatest fear is that the ‘leftards’ will put every log in the road that they can to truncate Milee’s government as they did to Trump. They may yet be proved right.