Image: Thirteen

Javier Milei is the rhetoric in the televised debate, where it’s fun to watch him fight shouting at everyone and declaring “Long live freedom, damn it!”. Perhaps his histrionics had put him outside the “serious” alternative in election forecasts, but it worked for him. The message is the same as Donald Trump announced during his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016: You politicians have destroyed my country, and here I am to make it great again. However, Milei based her criticism of political “caste” (nothing to do with Podemos) on the wrong management of the economy by the government for “122 years”.

Liberal messages are impossible to sell anywhere nowadays, because that means going against the “rights” granted by the government. Milei also couldn’t have done it if not for two aspects of her rhetoric. The first is credible data handling. As an economist, he knows how to argue the numbers on Argentina’s progressive economic disaster. Inside it speech celebrates the results, going to the extreme of trampling on the phrase “social justice”, so dear to Pedro Sánchez in Spain, which he calls the “maximum deviation” (05.20) of the “caste model”. It expresses in simple terms what does not work in the collectivist system that we also have around here: “The model is based on cruelty saying that where there is need, rights are born” (04.05), cruelty or not that they have calmly proclaimed as a universal truth politician as high as Gordon Brown in Great Britain.

For two minutes he wipes out the usual conventions with a data broom: 20 crises of fiscal origin in a century, debts, defaults, tax and regulatory amounts, etc. And he ended this part of his speech, which was the heart of his campaign, by contrasting its second part which is the tricolon, two rhetorical devices that have always, always earned public applause: “In which does not side with anyone who wants to make a good business, an honest business.” , and only benefit thieves, prebendaries, and friends in power” (07.00).

The second rhetorical aspect that makes Milei a winner is the way she expresses herself. He not only screams, and screams a lot (8.30, 12.00, etc.), with his voice turning into a low-frequency roar, but also uses the silence to dominate the audience. Pauses show that the speaker is not only responsible for what he said, but also for what he did not say. Staying silent for two seconds or more in front of large crowds, while looking at them, is a simple and safe way to communicate authority. His disheveled appearance is reminiscent of Boris Johnson, with a touch of irreverence in formal appearances, which sets him apart from the stereotypical respectable but boring politician. She can wear presbyopic glasses, which seem to prevent her from breathing, but her lack of images makes her even more endearing.

Now Milei is just waiting for October. If he can survive the smear campaign that awaits him as an unsupportive libertarian, he might as well.