Javier Milei didn’t just promise to fix Argentina’s economy when he entered politics. He promised to make Argentina’s traditional way of doing politics obsolete.

He gave the enemy a name: la casta. The professional politicians, the provincial power brokers, the whole intermediary class that had spent decades protecting each other while the country declined. Milei didn’t plan to get better at their game. He planned to make the game irrelevant.

Three years on, something closer to the reverse is happening. Milei has reshaped Argentine politics, no question. But Argentine politics is reshaping him right back.

With the 2027 election starting to loom, the president looks more and more like the head of an ordinary political coalition. 

La Libertad Avanza (LLA) is talking to Mauricio Macri’s PRO again. The government needs governors on side. And Milei, who built his whole identity on accusing the political establishment of rigging the system in its own favor, is now pushing to rewrite the rules of the next election just as he prepares to run in it.

It’s tempting to call this hypocrisy. Tempting, yet not especially useful.

Some of it looks more like growing up in the job.

Milei, a libertarian economist with no prior experience in politics, except for a two-year stint as a national deputy, arrived at the Casa Rosada in December 2023 in a strange position for a president.

He had no provinces, no territorial machine, tiny minorities in both houses of Congress, and a bloc of legislators who’d barely set foot in politics before. That was the appeal. He’d apparently proven the old machinery could be skipped entirely.

Governing turned out to be a different story. Argentina is a federal republic. Governors hold territory and political resources, Congress can’t be wished away, and a law passed with support from people you can’t stand beats a perfect law that never leaves your desk. 

Figuring that out doesn’t make Milei part of the caste. It might just make him a more competent president.

The more interesting shift is that Milei now has something he lacked when he showed up: power worth holding onto. That changes the math.

What reelection requires that disruption didn’t

Take the PRO rapprochement. Milei spent his rise........

© Buenos Aires Herald