Barking mad?

Prior to Argentina’s presidential election last November, the vote’s ultimate winner, Javier Milei, put out a list rebutting 26 items of gossip being spread about him online. Many were pretty standard accusations, like “Milei will remove pensions” or “With Milei, workers will earn less”. Others were more unusual, such as “[Milei will legalise] selling of children”, “Milei is a NAZI”, “Milei talks with dead dogs” and “Milei fucked his sister” (this is, verbatim, how it was actually phrased). Alarmingly, it would appear only some of these rumours were untrue. When a critic once described him as “a dishevelled [talk-show] panellist who screams on a stage and sleeps with eight dogs and his sister”, Milei’s only reply was: “I don’t have eight dogs.” ¹ As for another ‘debunked’ slur – “Milei has psychological problems” – the jury is still very much out …

The standard response to Milei’s election in Western media was that Milei was, indeed, a total nutter. He had to be: he offered various non-liberal policies, like abortion-scepticism, and embraced Thatcherite free-market economics. He appeared at rallies brandishing a chainsaw, promising to chop up the bloated Argentine State by closing 11 of 18 government ministries, “dynamiting” the National Bank, and ‘dollarising’ the economy (effectively replacing the highly devalued peso, a currency now “worth less than excrement”, with the US dollar). Why such media panic? Was this just a new version of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ among the piously progressive commentariat class, or does Mr Milei indeed suffer from genuine mental problems?

In favour of the latter option is the fact that ever since he was a shunned and bullied schoolboy, prone to sudden outbursts of violent temper against his teachers, Milei has gone by the nickname of El Loco – ‘The Loony’. Indeed, El Loco is the title of the new unauthorised biography of Milei by Argentinian journalist Juan Luis González, from which many of the weirdest rumours about the new President first emerged. By