It is no longer the Latin American macroeconomic haven of unstoppable growth, but for Argentine politics Chile continues to be a normality that Argentina has not yet achieved. Sunday’s presidential election offered two postcards. First, the scene that evoked the most obvious admiration: the Phone call from outgoing president to president-elect. A dialogue based on the logic of political coexistence even if there is a change in ideologies in power. In the Chilean case this time there was a change between the more accentuated left, that of Gabriel Boric in alliance with the Communist Party and the most defined right of José Luis Kast. But this scene does not take place in a vacuum: it requires the existence of a prior consensus, which is very difficult for society and politics to achieve. And there is the other photo that the Chilean election offered and that received the least comment, an important postcard of 35 years of Chilean democracy: the continuity of macroeconomic rationality, which is surprising from the Argentinean perspective.
For the Argentine political leadership, Chile represents a possible regional utopia, although this is still a long way off on this side of the Andes: uncontested democratic consensus crossed with sustainable macroeconomic consensusno matter what political symbol holds the presidency. In Argentina the first is a fact. The second reason is the high outstanding debt.
The Chilean case takes on even more substance given the Argentine situation. We need to pay attention to two pieces of news in recent days: they have to do with two efforts to outline the foundations of a macroeconomic architecture that can withstand the corrosion of political change. There is news from this Monday: the beginning “A new phase” in the currency program, according to them Advertising the central bank. Milei’s management begins the second half of its mandate with a focus on two of the main critical issues facing the macro-Milei: the level of reserves and the exchange rate. According to the Central Bank, 2026 will become synonymous with the management year that Milei and his economic team are entering Reserve building phase and a floating exchange rate between bands, but increasingly realistic, now better adjusted to inflation.
The other news from last week is the executive branch’s submission of the bill to Congress to a tougher punishment regime with fiscal rulesbanning deficit budgets and imposing ten years in prison on officials who authorize spending or increasing spending without support.
In both cases, the government aims to consolidate the macroeconomic order and its continuity in the short term, but also in the medium term: if this law is adopted – and if it survives judicial scrutiny – the political change would not entail the risks of macroeconomic repercussions that it currently entails. For example, the record purchase of dollars made by Argentines in October because of the risk of official defeat in the midterm elections: 4,699 million dollars in a single month. If it takes time for the macro-rational culture to gain a foothold in politics and among voters, Milei tries to enforce it through law. The goal is for rational macroeconomics to endure beyond itself: that would be its greatest legacy.
The Chilean economy is under pressure: the diagnosis is “stagnating growth”. The “miracle” of the Chilean Concertación of the 1990s, with average annual growth of around 6.2 percent, with peaks of 11.5 in 1992 and stagnation of around 1.8 percent in recent years, came to an end. “This vigorous growth trend lost strength and in the 2020s growth barely exceeded 2 percent,” says a June 2025 IMF report. However, unlike Argentina, this challenge is occurring in a cultural horizon in which inflation is unthinkable. In 1990, Chile returned to democracy with inflation at 26 percent, but within ten years, in 2000, after a decade of steep and sustained decline, inflation had already risen to 3.8 percent. In recent years, with the exception of 2020 and 2021, it has fluctuated around 3 and 4 percent respectively due to the pandemic.
He public expenditure It is also increasing. The most critical increase occurred between 2014 and 2018, during the second presidency of Michelle Bacheletwhen it settled at around 20 percent, again far from Argentine standards. Even with the outbreak of 2019, already in the second presidency of Sebastian PineraThe macro indicators that so worry Argentina were far from national distortions: this year Chilean inflation was only 2.25 percent.
From a Chilean perspective, this macro has problems. “Massive rejection of the ideas that brought stagnation and decadence. Great triumph for freedom and democracy. Freedom and common sense advance across the continent. VLLC!!!” This is what the Argentine Deputy Minister of Economic Affairs said in X, Jose Luis Dazawhich celebrated the triumph of José Antonio Kast. As a Chilean, Daza knows the trans-Andean economic panorama like no other: Since the return of democracy in Chile, the Chilean macro has begun to crumble. From an Argentine point of view, the desire for continuity of macroeconomic rationality on the part of a left-wing experience like Boric’s, beyond criticizable decisions, is enviable.
This Chilean-style macroeconomic postcard is the one that resonates in Argentina. And it raises two questions. First, what role does Milei’s presidency play in the context of Argentina’s great impossibility? What historical role does his mandate play given the lack of macroeconomic continuity between liberal and pero-Kirchnerist experiences? And even more: what role does it play after the unfulfilled promises of the two liberal experiences of forty years of Argentine democracy?
After Menemism came its downfall and a political-economic experience in the opposite direction: Kirchnerism, first that of Néstor Kirchner and then that of Cristina Fernández. After the macroeconomic rationality of Macri and Cambiemos, the fourth version of Kirchnerism returned, also with opposite guidelines. For Milei, the problem is that the two experiences with the desire for an orthodox and rational macroeconomic reorganization, each with its nuances, ended in failure.. Milei has the dual historical responsibility of making economic liberalism economically and socially successful. And that it also creates continuity, regardless of who is in power.
Chile did it. And in a way that is unimaginable to the Argentine eye: for a continuity of politics from the Pinochet dictatorship to the Concertación democracy and beyond, even with Bachelet and Boric, even with their problematic points. Alejandro Foxley was the Concertación’s first finance minister. Already in democracy, it adopted the model of Pinochet’s Chicago Boys, which grew by 7 percent, with improvements in social aspects: commercial and economic openness, fiscal balance, independent central bank.
Javier Milei’s project takes place between these two parties: between the collateral effects of the adjustment party in one extreme case and the inflation partyin the other. That is, on the one hand, libertarian management is obliged to demonstrate a central point: that political experiences that promise a rational ordering of the macroeconomy with adaptation as the first step do not end in a crisis, a social outbreak and a new escalation of poverty levels. On the other hand, Milei’s economic policy is forced to destroy the common sense that supports the pero-Kirchnerist experience of power, the inflation party: the promotion of the internal market and consumption at the expense of public coffers and unstoppable emissions and inflation.
For this reason, the Chilean experience is a fundamental test case for Milei: the recipes offered by the center-right proposals in Argentina have been successful in Chilean democracy. The macro order led to growth and the reduction of poverty, but also inequality. The Chilean experience shows historically that adaptation is only the first step in a chain of macroeconomic causes and effects that leads first to equilibrium or budget surplus and falling inflation and then to growth, development, more middle class and less inequality.
From this confrontation with a macro as stable as the Chilean one and the comparison with the Argentine discontinuity, a second question arises: Why does much of Argentine politics continue to view Chilean democracy as a path to consolidating inequality and social injustice when key indicators refute this version? The category “neoliberalism” as a name for everything bad.
The facts say otherwise. Between 2000 and 2020, Chile spent half as much on social protection as Argentina, but the poverty rate was barely a third of Argentina’s. The data comes from the CIAS’s “Map of Social Policies in Argentina. Contributions to a Fairer and More Efficient Social Protection System”. And according to Chile’s own indicators, poverty fell by 40 percent between 1990 and 2018. Inequality also decreased. In addition, Latin America’s educational system has the best results and its vulnerable sectors are more involved in university than in Argentina.
The Kirchnerist interpretation is a symptom of an epistemological limitation of Kirchnerism: a political-cognitive resistance that privileges belief and ideology over perception and reality. Based on this distorted mirror, Kirchnerism and much of Peronism in general consolidates itself as the party that does not believe in the macro order. Without a political perception free of ideological commitments and based on an analysis of the facts, the continuity of the macro-rational faces an enormous obstacle. Any ideological change can move them away from their center.
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