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Javier Milei, a ‘Mini-Trump,’ Could Be Argentina’s Next President

The global far-right movement faces an important test in Argentina’s election on Sunday.

                    He made his name disparaging people on television. He levels harsh attacks against critics online. He sports an unruly hairdo that has become a meme. And he is now the leader of his country’s far right.

Donald J. Trump, and his rise to the American presidency in 2016, shares some striking similarities with the man behind the moment unfolding in Argentina, the nation’s new political sensation, Javier Milei.

Mr. Milei, a libertarian economist and television pundit, was once seen as a sideshow in Argentina’s presidential race, not taken seriously by the news media or his opponents. Now — after a brash, outsider campaign based on a promise that he alone can fix the nation’s deep economic woes — he is the favorite to win the election outright on Sunday or head to a runoff next month.

Mr. Milei, 52, has already upended the politics of this nation of 46 million. His pledges to eliminate Argentina’s central bank and ditch its currency for the U.S. dollar have dominated the national conversation, while also helping to fuel a further collapse in the value of the Argentine peso.

But it has been his bellicose political style that has attracted comparisons with Mr. Trump, as well as widespread concern in Argentina and beyond about the damage his government could inflict on Latin America’s third-largest economy.

Mr. Milei has attacked the press and the pope; declared climate change part of “the socialist agenda”; called China, Argentina’s second-largest trade partner, an “assassin”; pledged looser controls on guns; claimed he is the victim of voter fraud; questioned the most recent presidential elections in the United States and Brazil; and suggested that the far-right riots that followed those votes were leftist plots.

“There was no complaint or challenge, nor was there any systematic ballot theft,” Argentina’s electoral court said in a statement. “We are concerned that such statements are made without accompanying legal filings to investigate.”

Mr. Milei’s campaign said it had recruited 100,000 volunteers to monitor polling stations on Election Day. But in a television interview on Thursday, Mr. Milei said he was still worried about stolen votes.

He claimed that the alleged fraud in the primaries had cost him at least several percentage points of support. “Some say two and a half points, others say three, and others say five,” he said. “Whatever the number is, it may be decisive.”

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