These elections were the first national test of President Milei’s popularity since he took office in 2023, pledging to shrink state spending by taking a metaphorical “chainsaw” to it. He brandished a real one during his campaign rallies.<\/p>\n
He’s since cut budgets for education, pensions, health, infrastructure, and subsidies, and laid off tens of thousands of public sector workers.<\/p>\n
Supporters, including Trump, hail him for taming inflation – which hit triple figures annually before he took office – cutting the deficit, and restoring investor confidence.<\/p>\n
His critics, though, argue the price has been job losses, a decline in manufacturing, crumbling public services, a fall in people’s purchasing power and an imminent recession.<\/p>\n
Juliana, who works with children with disabilities in Tucum\u00e1n province, is concerned that a law to increase funding for people with disabilities – which Milei vetoed, before being overturned – could be “in danger” with the president’s position strengthened in Congress.<\/p>\n
“Our salaries are low, it remains the same, while other things are increasing. We still don’t see a change,” she added.<\/p>\n
Veronica, a retired police officer, has been hit by Milei’s pension cuts.<\/p>\n
“You see a lot of poverty,” she said. “It’s very hard: for retirees, for people with children with disabilities, for young people. There’s a lot of unemployment. Many factories have closed.”<\/p>\n
Milei has also kept inflation down by propping up the peso, leaving it overvalued and draining reserves ahead of $20bn of debt repayments next year.<\/p>\n
This had caused alarm that Argentina could be hurtling towards an economic crisis.<\/p>\n
That, coupled with a poor election result in Buenos Aires province in September, spooked the financial markets that Milei’s cost-cutting agenda may not be politically sustainable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"These elections were the first national test of President Milei’s popularity since he took office in 2023, pledging…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227691,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-227690","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227690"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227690\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}