Undoing Social Policy: The Far Right and the Poor in Argentina

Behind President Javier Milei’s 2023 electoral success lay deep failures by previous governments to lessen the damaging consequences of the country’s neoliberal transformation, especially its legacy of persistent labour informality and precarity at the core of declining incomes and increasing poverty throughout the country. Yet his broad appeal also revealed an expanding consensus that the crisis confronting the country was not the result of various flaws of neoliberalism but rather of the path followed to patch them up. It is within this confounding context that we decode the harsh libertarian approach to poverty and the poor and the policies and institutions through which the current administration has, thus far, attempted to govern them. We argue that social policy reforms undertaken by the far-right Argentinean government seek to undermine extensive organisational networks that unemployed and informal workers have created over more than 30 years of struggles, with individualising social programmes becoming consolidated as a counterweight. These transformations stand as the backdrop of an approach to poverty that has emphasised the stigmatisation of recipients, the criminalisation of their organisations, and high levels of repression against them all.