Argentina’s Libertarian Turn: Crisis, Political Disruption, and the Electoral Bases of Milei’s Radical Project

This lecture examines the conditions behind Javier Milei’s meteoric rise and his libertarian-radical right movement in Argentina. The analysis unfolds across three dimensions. First, it reconstructs the political and economic context that made Milei’s emergence possible: a deep crisis of representation, accelerated by COVID-19, compounding years of inflation, economic instability, and disillusionment with a political class that had repeatedly failed to deliver. Second, it examines Milei’s distinctive political offer — a radical libertarian ideology combining anarcho-capitalist economics, cultural conservatism, and an aggressive anti-establishment discourse. Third, it draws on a multi-method longitudinal study of his electoral base, combining a quantitative survey (December 2023) with qualitative research through WhatsApp group observation and in-depth interviews. Findings show that economic grievance — particularly the lived experience of inflation and downward mobility — was the primary driver of support, intersecting with a persistent rejection of the established political class, while cultural backlash played a notably lesser role than in comparable radical right cases.

Gabriel Vommaro is Professor of Political Sociology at the Universidad de San Martín and Researcher at the Argentinian National Research Council, CONICET. He received his PhD from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. His research focuses on political activism and political parties (mainly, on right-wing parties), political clientelism and the state, and political communication. His books include The Recasting of the Latin American Right (Cambridge University Press, 2024, edited with A. Borges & R. Lloyd), La era del hartazgo. Líderes disruptivos, polarización y antipolítica en América Latina (Siglo XXI, 2025, edited with G. Kessler), and Conservatives against the Tide (Cambridge University Press, 2023).