Javi, until the victory always!

“A dangerous madman,” shouted the armchair economists. “The end of Argentina,” predicted the harbingers of the welfare state. Paul Krugman, the eternal Nobel laureate of wrong predictions, warned of “imminent disaster.” The IMF turned up its nose. Progressive European commentators were already preparing obituaries for Argentine democracy.

Curiously, the only thing that died was their credibility. But that, let's face it, had been in palliative care for decades.

Javier Milei didn't emerge from nowhere. He sprouted from the fertile ground that eight decades of Peronism carefully fertilized with rampant inflation, metastatic clientelism, and a political class that turned the plundering of public funds into an Olympic sport. When a country reaches 211% annual inflation, even a chainsaw seems like a precision surgical instrument.

The economist with the unruly hair and fiery rhetoric didn't promise the moon and the stars; he promised pain, adjustment, and reality. And the Argentinians, tired of decades of sugary promises that invariably ended in hyperinflation, bread lines, and capital controls, did something radical: they voted for the truth. What a scandal.

What followed was an exercise in deconstructing the extractive state so effective that it would have made Bakunin envious (if Bakunin understood economics, of course). Milei didn't cut the fat; he amputated the parasite that had disguised itself as muscle for decades.

Dozens of ministries disappeared like tears in the rain. Subsidies that served only to feed electoral bosses were eliminated. The Central Bank, that misery printing press disguised as a financial institution, saw its obituary written. And most extraordinarily, it worked.

Inflation, that old lady who terrorized generations of Argentinians, has begun to recede. Public finances, for the first time in recent memory, are approaching balance. The Argentine peso, a currency that was once worth less than the paper it was printed on, is regaining some dignity.

The prophets of the apocalypse, however, changed the subject. With remarkable spinal flexibility.

And this is where the story gets truly delicious. In Lisbon's cafes, where theorizing about revolution takes place over €4 croissants, panic has set in. Because if Milei demonstrates that it's possible to dismantle the bloated state without society collapsing, or worse, proving that it thrives, decades of progressive narrative evaporate like dew in the midday sun.

Observe the media choreography: when Argentine inflation drops from 25% to 2.7% per month, it's a footnote on page 23. When Milei says a controversial phrase on Twitter, it's front-page news. When the fiscal deficit turns into a surplus, there's a deathly silence. When there's a protest by public sector unions, it's minute-by-minute coverage.

The fear isn't about Milei. The fear is that the Portuguese will do the math and realize that we have more public employees per capita than the European average, that 50% of our GDP is consumed by the state, that our public debt remains stratospheric, and that perhaps, just perhaps, the problem isn't "lack of public investment" but an excess of state intervention.

The recent Argentine legislative elections were the second act of this liberal opera. Milei's coalition achieved a victory that analysts would prefer to forget, given the violence it inflicts on their ideas. The Argentine people, that mysterious entity that stubbornly refuses to vote as intellectuals dictate, reaffirmed that they prefer the chainsaw to promises.

In Portugal, the mourning was discreet but palpable. In the Left Bloc, where there is still a dream that socialism simply wasn't tried in the right way, there was dismay. In the PCP, a basilica of museum-like Marxism-Leninism, there was barely contained despair. In LIVRE, where a progressivism as green as it is naive is practiced, there was perplexity: how can the people be so stupid as to vote against their own interests (that is, against what we have decided are their interests)?

The narrative falls apart. Milei is no accident. It's a symptom of something bigger, a civilizational weariness with watered-down socialism, this sanitized version of expropriation that promises to redistribute wealth while guaranteeing the distribution of poverty.

Hayek warned: “Socialism, to work, needs to economically tyrannize the individual.” Milton Friedman was surgical: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there will be a shortage of sand.” And Mises concluded what history has proven ad nauseam: “Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system that works.”

Milei is not a libertarian messiah; he is simply someone who read the manuals, looked at reality, and had the courage (or madness) to apply the obvious: you cannot eternally spend more than you produce. You cannot print prosperity. You cannot redistribute what you did not create.

Argentina is far from being a paradise. But for the first time in decades, it has something that Peronism systematically destroyed: hope grounded in real numbers, not empty rhetoric.

And this, my dear panicked progressives, is unforgivable. Because if a "madman" in Argentina succeeds where generations of "sensible" people have failed, what excuses are left to explain why we continue to feed the same state monsters in Europe?

Javi, until victoria always? Perhaps. But one thing is certain, until the socialist torpor is awakened, definitively.