The two most important Argentine heads of state and government in the world coincided at the G-7 meeting. Despite differing in age and profession, despite the different duration of their mandates, despite the fact that the ideology of popular economy and social justice of one only finds hostility in the other, Jorge Mario Bergoglio (87 years old) and Javier Milei ( 53 years old), however, they are united by a determining religious feeling in human life. Keeping the scale proportions in mind, for both of us it has been a triumph and a debut to appear in the Summit photo.
A Pope and a President debut on the same day
Since the seven major industrial powers of the West began to meet formally in 1975, they have never invited a Pope to an annual Summit. The Peronist Pope is the first to be invited.
The invitation was a special and deliberate decision of the Italian post-fascist premier, 2024 president of the G-7 and host of the meeting. Giorgia Meloni is a practicing Catholic and conservative on societal issues. She invited the highest authority of her Church to speak on Artificial Intelligence, one of the issues discussed in this meeting. Liberal in economics, she invited the Argentine, the world’s first liberal-libertarian president who is also conservative in matters of morality, pro-Ukraine, pro-US, although more pro-Israel than her.
Simply Georgia
On Thursday the Roman Pontiff delivered the humanist and anti-technocratic speech expected of the religious leader. The one expected by Meloni, a big winner in the European parliamentary elections on Sunday, where she had presented a testimonial candidacy as a deputy for her Fratelli di Italia party. And she had had herself registered on her ballot with only her first name: because the people treat her like that, Giorgia, her tute, not like the cold elitist technocrat Mario Draghi, her predecessor. She is the only head of government of the 4 European countries of the 7 of the Group that she won. The defeat inflicted by Marine Le Pen’s far-right on Emmanuel Macron caused the French president to call elections within three weeks. The German far-right got more votes than the social democratic party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. And the growth of the right may also be the key to the defeat of the British conservative Rishi Sunak in July.
Giorgia hoped that the final document of this Summit would avoid the term abortion. He managed to avoid the word that was explicit in previous documents. He did not get the concept omitted, in a passage where the 7 most powerful countries in the world (except China and Russia) committed to developing and financing campaigns for women’s sexual and reproductive health.
Javier, an uneven champion
Until this opportunity in the city of Fasano, in the southern region of Apulia, at the heel of the boot that the Italian peninsula draws in the Mediterranean Sea, Javier Milei was a media idol on the far-right margins of European and American politics because He had won elections that his comrades (Jair Messias Bolsonaro in Brazil or Santiago Abascal in Spain) lost.
In front of the rulers of the seven most powerful states of Western capitalism (Japan is the West), he was a president who had won elections, who retained popularity, and who for the first time, with the eventful vote in Congress of the diminished Bases in Law a distant but present backdrop, he saw himself and could pretend to be seen as a functional Executive.
Kristalina’s transparencies
Beyond the counterclaims he received on the spot from IMF technicians, who urged him to lift the exchange rate trap, the bilateral meeting with Kristalina Georgieva, a person also with firm religious convictions – a faithful devotee of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church since before the Fall of the Wall-, had the flavor and photogenicity of the victory that followed the agreement confirmed for 800 million dollars of necessity and urgency.
Milei, perhaps innocent of the pun, praised Kristalina Gueorguieva by insisting on her “hypertransparency” and she reciprocated by insisting on “the love for the economy” that unites them more than the horror of the debt that has flown forward.
For Dr. Alberto, there is no one better than the operator Lula
The great absentee on the table and the photo of the superpowers is the second economy on the planet. The People’s Republic of China, which in extremis had decided to refinance the payments of the Argentine debt of 5,000 million dollars. This bank swap in yuan had been negotiated in Beijing to help the government of Alberto Fernández. The former president’s personal negotiator who, before becoming president, visited him in prison where the Lava Jato lawfare had imprisoned him was the Brazilian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who briefly greeted Bergoglio and kept his distance from Milei.
A bill endorsed by PT allies in the federal Congress and that equates abortion with homicide in pregnancies terminated after week 22 is the political debate of the day in Brasilia. A Catholic believer, Lula prefers that Italian photos harm the image of his equanimity.
For a communist there is nothing better than another free trader
Absent at the Summit, President Xi Jinping wants Milei present in China to sign the agreement. The Argentine spoke without nuances about the continental Chinese single-party political system and against that party, the Communist Party. Some activists from the ruling La Libertad Avanza (LLA) would have crossed the red line of giving national status to Taiwan, the island that Beijing claims as a ‘rebel province’. Of all the large exporting economies, however, none is as virulent and determined as China in its defense of free trade.
In contrast to the US of Joe Biden (or Donald Trump) and the European Union (EU), which while the G-7 was meeting voted new and higher tariffs for the import of Chinese electric cars. That is to say, with no economic leadership does Milei have as much doctrinal affinity as with the guides of the Communist Party whom he must visit at his home much earlier than planned, pressed by the debt.
AGB
