The International Monetary Fund applauded last week Argentina’s attempt to restore “macroeconomic stability.” The dark clouds have not dissipated, the organization warned, and the horizon is still very gloomy. Javier Milei, in any case, celebrates the improvement in productive indicators and tries to deepen his agenda of cuts despite the increase in poverty and at the cost of disruption of the social climate. But this is not the only problem. The risk is that the numbers manipulate the picture of what is happening in the country. And in the long shot, an enormous deterioration in politics stands out, in which the verbal violence promoted by the president and replicated endlessly on social networks hurts the coexistence, respect and serenity that should govern in a democracy.

The latest sinister statements by the far-right president are framed in a trail of daily insults against his adversaries. “There is also a part of morbidity, and I would love to put the last nail in the drawer of Kirchnerism with Cristina in it,” he launched in reference to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The ominous image does not require any effort to interpret. The former president, who suffered an attack in September 2022 and recently ran to lead the Peronist movement, he responded bluntly. “So now you want to kill me too? “You are nervous and aggressive because all the stupid things that you said on TV for years and still keep repeating are just that: stupid,” he wrote in a long message on X, in which he reproaches him for having betrayed, through incompetence, even his own program and having ended up asking for help from the also former neoliberal ruler Mauricio Macri.

But this is only a sample of the exacerbation of the political battle. a few days ago, The former Minister of Health during the pandemic, Ginés González García, died. who resigned due to a scandal involving vaccines for people with connections and connections, a very serious crime for which he was being prosecuted. Among all the criticisms that Milei could dedicate to the deceased, he chose words that are rarely heard in the mouth of a head of state: “It seems that the dead become good. No, this was a son of a bitch and he will be remembered as a son of a bitch.”

Everything fits into language and one of its springs is precisely that absence of limits that the economist proclaims. But its trivialization turns freedom into debauchery. And the political discussion in absurdity. “You can’t give the shitty lefty an inch,” the president once snapped on a set. The interviewer asked him why he resorted to that insult. “Because they are shit, because if you think differently they will liquidate you. You can’t give the lefty a single millimeter. “You can’t negotiate with that shit.” With these premises, not only ideological, but also about coexistence, Milei speaks to Argentines. With insults. He did it with much fewer filters when he was in the opposition, but he continues to do it from the Casa Rosada, where in less than a year he has fought with half the continent and also caused a diplomatic crisis with Spain. He called his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, a “terrorist murderer.” and adhered to the most fanciful arguments of Vox or Alvise Pérez against the Government of Pedro Sánchez.

Milei is a political anomaly and that was probably his main electoral asset. His opinions on the caste of which he himself is now a part, however, have already caused him more than a problem in Congress, which at the beginning of his term he described as a “rat’s nest.” “One of the things why politicians don’t see what I do is that we start from different premises. They start from an assumption where they believe that people love them. “I start from the assumption that they are shit,” he said at a conference. Rhetorical violence as a permanent campaign.