The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, received this Saturday (06/22/2024) a medal from the August von Hayek Foundation in the German port of Hamburg. The award, awarded by the think tank named after the Austrian pioneer of neoliberalism, was awarded for leading a fundamental change of course to “free the population from shackles” and restore “hope.”
Before about 200 supporters, among whom was the Alternative for Germany (AfD) parliamentarian Beatrix von Storch, Milei gave a speech of about 50 minutes where he claimed to be defeating the “socialists” with “the largest fiscal adjustment in history of Argentina.” Those present chanted Milei’s slogan, “freedom,” in Spanish on several occasions.
The Argentine president attributed his arrival to power to his convictions, as the only Argentine politician who represents liberal economic ideas, with which he offered citizens the possibility of addressing problems that have affected the country for decades, such as high inflation, low productivity and a massive state apparatus.
violent socialists
“We decided to undertake an adjustment. Today I tell you that six months later we have made the largest fiscal adjustment in the history” of Argentina, Milei said to the applause of the public. “Obviously this was not going to be free of costs. But we always told people to their face that there was no money, that it was going to be hard, that the beginning was going to be complicated,” she stated.
In his opinion, “the socialists are so violent because (the adjustment) is working and the economic structure on which they have based their ideology is collapsing.”
The president of the Hayek Society and director of the Kiel Institute for Economic Studies (IfW), Stefan Kooths, praised Milei as one of the “rare pioneers who fortunately appear in moments of greatest need” to give a devastated country the opportunity to get out of the dead end to which “interventionism” has led it.
“Its main opponent is called cultural Marxism, since the purely economic socialism of Karl Marx has long been liquidated on a theoretical and practical level,” Kooths noted. Previously, the Swiss radio station Kontrafunk and the blog Achse des Guten, both considered center-right, received the same award.
DZC (dpa, EFE)
