SACRAMENTO—When economist Javier Milei won the Argentine presidency in 2023, the international media portrayed his victory in the light of America’s burgeoning populist movement. “ Who is Javier Milei?” asked The Guardian. Describing him as the country’s “new far-right president,” the publication compared him “to his fellow right-wing populists Donald Trump and [Brazil’s] Jair Bolsonaro.”

PBS wrote that “the fiery freshman lawmaker has thrust the country into the unknown regarding just how extreme his policies will be, following a campaign that saw him revving a chainsaw to symbolically cut the state down to size.” The article also made the obligatory comparisons to Trump. Every new president brings uncertainty, but Milei’s free-market policies certainly were known

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