If Argentine Politics Were an Amusement Park: Milei, the Caste, and the Dangerous Game of Power

If the world were an amusement park, politicians would spend all their time in bumper cars. There’s nothing else for them.

In that arena they have fun: they’re experts at it, they gently bounce off each other so as not to crash too hard, cushioning the danger with maneuvers to the left or right — it doesn’t matter. The point is to walk away from collisions and traffic jams unscathed on that electrified field.

Politicians love bumper cars so much that when their turn ends they rush back to the line, because all of them want to have the steering wheel in their hands again and hit it hard as if nothing matters.

Ordinary people seldom approach the politicians’ game; the line is always incredibly long, and there are plenty of insiders who cut in front — the friends of the ticket clerk, who always get to the front of the line. In short: it’s unbearable for most.

The political success or failure of Javier Milei depends exclusively on his economic success or failure.

Let’s start by discarding the honest people.

Moreover, it’s an extremely dangerous game. Despite appearances, it’s one of the most accident-prone in the entire world.

In Argentina too, this was the case for many years until one day, after humanity entered a swirl of madness and obscurantism in which it still spins frenetically, Milei appeared.

Javier, the Argentine enfant terrible, quickly became an absolutely unintelligible global phenomenon intent on revolutionizing everything — day after day, with pick and shovel. Milei is fighting to change the game.

With a massive popular mandate, he offered the losers two choices: a) remove the soft rubber bumpers they used to crash into each other, society, and the judiciary; or b) change the game without leaving the amusement park of politics that everyone enjoyed so much.

Milei convinced them with a flood of votes that people could no longer tolerate seeing them behave this way, that the bumper-car image was obsolete, and that the public hated them for it.

And so he persuaded a defeated, divided, and depressed enemy, shaken by his overwhelming victory, to abandon the old game and plunge everyone onto a roller coaster. That was never the official ride for Argentine politicians in this beautiful amusement park that God gave them.

Milei has a unique epic: to misrepresent it would be a travesty.

In a short time, the initial courage that challenged the government has waned, replaced by an aggressive attitude among easily identifiable groups determined to halt the movement Milei initiated at any cost. Yet they tend to fail. They end up badly bruised. Cristina Kirchner’s son, Máximo, is an example.

The kirchnerismo governed for sixteen years; that’s many mandates. They infiltrated the state like geological layers of thousands of militants in every area, rewarded by their fanaticism and capacity to deploy patronage — their “meritocracy.” As the deepest, oldest, and most entrenched layers are scratched away, public support for Milei grows.

For now, one might call him “Nilei,” because although laws haven’t materialized, he has driven the “caste” onto the roller coaster, and the caste is afraid. They are seen vomiting what they once swallowed without shame. And worse, the street is slipping away little by little, and the narrative they invented and plagiarized is now nothing more than a verse that no one believes anymore.

However, even if he gains some partial results, perhaps that will be enough for Argentines to defend the constitutional order and avoid repeating the errors of the past. One cannot permit an open destabilization of the government to culminate in a political–syndical coup like that of 2001.