Luna Park is the most emblematic stadium in Buenos Aires. The most iconic boxing matches in the country were held at Luna. At Luna, Argentines mourned the death of tango singer Carlos Gardel. Soccer star Diego Armando Maradona celebrated his wedding there and they met former president Juan Domingo Perón and his future wife, Eva Duarte. Avoid. This Wednesday, the Luna was the scene of another unprecedented event: the Argentine president starred in a single-thematic recital with his band of friends. Nearly 5,000 people saw Javier Milei sing live and many stayed two more hours in the place to listen to the economic theory class he taught amid applause, criticism of legal abortion and chants against the president of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the former Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The ultra president repeated his staunch defense of free market ideas and urged his followers to spread them to win the cultural battle on the left: “If we don’t get into the mud, the lefties will take us.”
Milei’s original idea was to present her latest book, Capitalism, socialism and the neoclassical trap (Planeta, 2024) at the Buenos Aires Book Fair, the largest cultural event in Argentina. The president canceled the event because he considered that the organizers tried to boycott it in response to the Government’s refusal to set up official stands. “I want to thank those from the Book Fair Foundation, who with their attempted boycott gave us this party,” Milei said ironically, “Thank you Kirchnerists!” he added, identifying the organizers of the fair with the toughest wing of the Argentine opposition.
The president appeared through one of the doors of the stadium and crossed it through the audience like a rock star and then went on stage and sang Panic Show, the song from La Renga that became the classic of his electoral campaign. “Hello everyone, I am the lion,” Milei started to the applause of the fans who lined up for hours in a square near the stadium to get a free ticket.
“I am over 70 years old, I have two children and I tried very hard to make them study and to have a better country, but we are getting worse and worse. Milei is the last hope we have left to fix this,” said Marta, a retiree who held a banner with an Argentine flag in which the sun in the center had been replaced by a lion, the symbol with which the president identifies himself. Waiting next to her was a group of teenagers dressed in yellow capes and a drawing of the same animal.
Young men are the electoral base of the ultra La Libertad Avanza party, but its voters cross all age groups and social classes, as could be seen this Wednesday in Luna Park.
The atmosphere was festive, much more similar to that of a rock recital than that of a literary presentation, but there was some disappointment in the atmosphere when Milei sang only one of the two promised songs. She did it together with The Liberal Band, made up of her friends: the congressman and economist Bertie Benegas Lynch on drums, her brother Joaquín Benegas Lynch on guitar and one of Milei’s biographers, Marcelo Duclós, on bass.
After the mini concert, Milei began to describe his book and started a class on anarcho-capitalist economics interrupted by cheers for the free market and boos for the State and the economist John Maynard Keynes.
His detractors wonder what the president is celebrating when the country is in the middle of its umpteenth economic crisis. As soon as he came to power, Milei put the handbrake on public spending. The economy collapsed—it fell 5.3% in the first quarter of the year compared to the same period last year—and poverty shot up to nearly 50%. Even so, the president retains high popularity and those who support him believe that the adjustment was necessary to balance public accounts and eradicate the chronic evil of the economy, inflation, which today is 289% year-on-year, the highest in the world.
These days Milei has been involved in a tough diplomatic clash with the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, and the public included the socialist leader among his public enemies. “Sánchez, compadre, your mother’s shell,” those present chanted. They also asked him to put the former Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in prison, sentenced to four years for corruption in the first instance, and Milei diverted the ball towards the Judiciary.
A private event
Milei has assured that she will pay the event expenses out of her pocket. According to the newspaper The nation, A company paid ten million pesos (about $10,000) for the rental of Luna Park and the president has declared that he will return it with royalties from the book, of which the first two editions have already been sold out. “It doesn’t cost the State a cent, like none of my other activities,” Milei said in an interview with LN+. Her words clash with the accusations of the opposition, which has denounced the president to court for the use of the presidential plane for private trips.
Milei’s new book is surrounded by accusations of plagiarism, as happened with her previous publications. According to the investigation of journalist Tomás Rodríguez, Milei copied entire fragments without citing texts by the Chilean economists Verónica Mies and Raimundo Soto and the Argentine Fernando Toledo. The presidential spokesman, Manuel Adorni, denied the accusation: “There is no type of plagiarism, everything is framed in the intellectual property law.”
During his speech, Milei harshly criticized socialism and attacked “the enemies who want to overthrow this government.” He praised the virtues of the free market, but also included other issues from the far-right agenda such as the outright rejection of the voluntary interruption of pregnancy. “Those who believe they are so advanced with the abortion agenda is an agenda that is more than 3,000 years old and is an absolutely murderous agenda promoted by a couple of salamis who did their math wrong,” she denounced. The final section of the event was a conversation between Milei, Adorni, and deputy José Luis Espert. And they said goodbye between little silver pieces of paper and shouts of “Long live freedom, damn it” while “The explosion is coming” by Bersuit Vergarabat played.
