Javier Milei Is Neoliberalism’s Great Latin Hope

Argentinian President Javier Milei spent the first weeks of his summer taking a victory lap across Europe, embarking on a tour that served as a prime example of how neoliberal think tanks, intellectuals, and their financial backers organize themselves on a global scale. Before Milei accepted the Hayek Medal from the Friedrich A. von Hayek Society in Hamburg on 22 June, stopped over in Prague to receive a prize from the local Liberal Institute on 18 June. He then travelled to Madrid to the Instituto Juan de Mariana on 21 June to receive an award honouring free-market propagandists.

Milei is the new darling and a source of hope for troubled neoliberals and rising national conservatives around the world. His open declaration of war on trade unions and environmental organizations is a balm to the soul of neoliberal organizations, which have been on the defensive in many countries around the world as a result of multiple crises and the failure of radical free-market ideas.

Dismantling Argentina's already weak welfare state in the name of economic freedom and monetary stability — a way of pandering to the interests of the wealthy — promises a return to the “master of the house” mentality of conservative traditionalists. Milei is bringing back the old tricks that drove Argentina to ruin in the 1990s: what is known as the “shock doctrine”, examined in detail by Naomi Klein. The increased use of physical violence and the anti-democratic restructuring of the state under Milei illustrate the close connection between right-wing liberalism, reactionary conservatism, and authoritarian regimes, recalling Pinochet’s Chile.

Milei is now a multiple award winner, putting him in the best of neoliberal company. Every one of the aforementioned institutes, as well as many other partner organizations, award prizes to a select number of neoliberal icons, including many academic members of the Mont Pèlerin Society, friendly journalists and politicians, and individual entrepreneurs. Among the 22 recipients of the Hayek Medal, there is exactly one woman: the conservative opinion researcher Prof Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. Since 2017, the Hayek Society has also awarded a Hayek Network Prize, which has gone to the global libertarian student organization Students for Liberty and the Swiss-based, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)-affiliated radio station Kontrafunk (founded by AfD member Burkard Müller-Ullrich), among others.

The spectacular electoral victory of the self-described anarcho-capitalist Milei provides deep insights into the transnational civil society of organized neoliberalism and its respective national cornerstones.

What Is the Hayek Society?

Germany’s Hayek Society was founded in Freiburg in 1998 to disseminate the ideas of neoliberal theorist Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992) in the political, business, and academic worlds. It does so through conferences and symposia, its annual Hayek Days, its Freedom Forum, and the work of Hayek Clubs throughout the German-speaking world. It organizes essay competitions for young academics while thanking deserving members and friends — including many economists and some legal scholars — with Hayek Medals. The Society’s work is financed by the Radmacher Foundation, whose funds will continue to flow as long as Gerd Habermann, the late founder’s confidant, continues to lead the Hayek Society.

The society has close links not only to Germany’s market-liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), the AfD, and the socially-conservative, economically liberal Values Union, but also to various economically liberal lobby organizations: from the Family Entrepreneurs association (Die Familienunternehmer), which, under its former name Working Group of Independent Entrepreneurs (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Selbständiger Unternehmer, or ASU), attacked the policies of Helmut Kohl’s conservative-liberal government from the right during in the 1980s–1990s; to Mises Institutes and their funders from Degussa Goldhandel; as well as the Jena Alliance, in which economic lobby organizations (New Social Free Market Initiative, the Family Entrepreneurs, the Catholic Business Federation) work together with foundations and neoliberal think tanks.

The forces of organized neoliberalism in Germany are supported by a whole range of entities that have banded together in the globally active Atlas Network. In addition to the Hayek Society, these include the Institute for Free Enterprise, which organizes annual climate change conferences with the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), hosting German, European, and international climate change deniers; the Freiburg Centre for European Policy; FDP parliamentarian Frank Schäffler’s Prometheus Institute; and the Network for Constitutional Economics and Social Philosophy (NOUS), founded by, among others, former Hayek Society chairwoman Karen Horn and Lars Feld, the former “economic sage” and close confidant of German Finance Minister Christian Lindner.

In the same way that both opponents and supporters of the far-right Republican Donald Trump are active in neoliberal and conservative think tanks in the US, a broad right-wing spectrum can be found in the Atlas Network’s local organizations in Germany. Some well-known FDP and Christian Democratic Union (CDU) supporters left the Hayek Society and founded the NOUS network due to the fact that the society was providing space for an increasing number of national conservative neoliberals close to the AfD. Nevertheless, FDP members still sit on the society’s board.

In 2021, AfD chairwoman Alice Weidel left the Hayek Society in order to undermine accusations that it was too close to the AfD. The current board sees no further need to distance itself from the right, despite the revelation that Ulrich Vosgerau, a Hayek Society member and Björn Höcke’s lawyer, participated in the Potsdam meeting on “remigration” with Martin Sellner. The political left is still seen as a far greater threat within the Hayek Society.

Friedrich August von Hayek: Icon of Neoliberalism and National Conservatism

The Hayek Society’s eponym represents the world of neoliberalism, whose conservative and reactionary dimensions have often been overlooked. In the recent past, neoliberalism has been interpreted with a focus on the absolutization of the market and a radicalization of increased individualism alongside the process of accelerated globalization. The socially conservative right-wing liberalism of the AfD (especially in its early days) was dismissed as “right-wing populism”. However, national and socially conservative circles can quite rightly refer to Hayek, who, like Wilhelm Röpke and many other neoliberals, rejected egalitarian values.

In his essay “Why I am Not a Conservative”, Hayek expressed the view that a society cannot remain rigidly stuck in the past. However, his perspective on change favoured slow processes that are by no means single-minded. Like neoliberalism as a whole, Hayek thus opposed orthodox ideas of bourgeois rule (be they classical-liberal laissez faire or rigid conservatism) as well as “collectivist” approaches to social change starting in the 1930s. Analogous to the idea of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whom he admired as much as she admired him, Hayek believed that social cohesion was rooted in the family and close community, not in society as a whole.

Protecting property (and therefore protecting the property owner), freedom of contract (property owners’ unrestricted freedom of action), and the rule of law (as protection against the intervention of democratically elected parliaments in economic freedom rights) are the central values of neoliberalism. As Michel Foucault and many other critics of neoliberalism emphasized, the market, competition, and individuality are, above all, counter-concepts to planning, state control, and the collective.

While neoliberals’ main concern used to be strong trade unions and Social Democratic and Communist parties, neoliberal criticism is increasingly focused on international political institutions.

Hayek wrote that it would be “desirable not only to tolerate monopolies but even to allow them to exploit their monopolistic positions-so long as they maintain them solely by serving their customers better than anyone else, and not by preventing those who think they could do still better from trying to do so”. According to Hayek, even a private monopoly only lasts if the state undermines the dynamics of private property.

In contrast to Germany’s ordoliberals, Hayek also saw no particular need to safeguard economic competition. His advocacy for overcoming rifts between secular liberalism and religion indicates that he did not see individualism as a sufficient basis for social order. When national conservatives support the basic neoliberal principles of property rights, freedom of contract, and the rule of law in matters of economic freedom, they are not fundamentally at odds with Hayek.

His relationship with Pinochet and Chile illustrates this attitude particularly well: Hayek wrote subtly about the difference between the authoritarian state, which protects economic freedom, and the totalitarian state, which restricts economic freedom. Throughout his life, Hayek's fight was not limited to the world of socialist states, but was also directed at social-democratic and, for example, Christian-socially inspired welfare states because they were based on the fundamental principle of redistribution.

Meloni, Le Pen, and Milei: The Fight over Global Redistribution

The new national conservative milieus are sometimes problematic from a neoliberal perspective because their attacks on the constitutional state can damage the principle of the “rule of law”. Neoliberal criticism of the state and politicians comes into play when governments and administrations not only use their power against trade unions and social movements, but also serve the self-interests of members of government. According to public choice theory, politicians always act in their own interests. The neoliberal view of the state is therefore always ambivalent. Neoliberalism won’t work without the state, because capitalist economic relations must be safeguarded. At the same time, politics needs to be controlled so that it remains in line with the market.

For neoliberals, one solution lies in decentralization, because it means that less mischief can be done. The numerous Mises Institutes around the world take a particularly radical view of this position. While neoliberals’ main concern used to be strong trade unions and Social Democratic and Communist parties — which is why neoliberal strategies restricted national parliaments through international institutions (economic constitutionalism) — neoliberal criticism is increasingly focused on international political institutions. Climate policy in particular, with its many regulatory approaches and demands for redistribution, is challenging the supremacy of private market regulation.

This is where neoliberal interests overlap with national conservative interests: in order to steer global climate policy in a market-compliant direction, they place global policy under national reserve. The European policy vision of the conservative reformers in Europe (Meloni and her allies), with many right-wing liberal MEPs, is just as easy to describe as that of the Identity and Democracy Group in the European Parliament (Le Pen and allies): wind down, concentrate on the essentials of the economic union, and increase competitiveness. Everything else is subordinated to this goal, including — and above all — environmental and climate policy.

The “Neoliberal Family” Extends into the Catholic Church

The Argentinian president’s trip to Europe was documented by Alejandro Chafuen through his regular column in Forbes. Like Milei, the Catholic neoliberal Chafuen comes from Argentina. He was also the youngest member of Hayek's Mont Pèlerin Society in the 1980s. In 1989, he succeeded Antony Fisher, the founder of the Atlas Network and a British confidant of Friedrich August von Hayek, as the network’s leader.

In the 20 years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, the Atlas Network grew to 120 member organizations under his leadership. Chafuen’s successor, the American Brad Lips, increased the number of members to 500. In Latin America, the neoliberal movement is bolstered by more than 100 institutes. They contributed significantly to the rise of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Milei in Argentina.

The branching out of the neoliberal and national conservative forces across continents and even into the Catholic Church shows that the full extent of the ‘neoliberal family’ only becomes clear when we consider the respective national members in their transnational context.

Milei hides the political influence of organized neoliberal civil society behind references to higher powers. In one of his Forbes articles, Chafuen repeats a biblical quote, which says that heavenly powers can also help small armies to victory, and places Milei close to the Jesuit namesake of the Juan de Mariana Prize. Chafuen knows what he is talking about: with the help of the Acton Institutes in the US, Argentina, and Italy, he has played a leading role in bringing the neoliberal forces within the Catholic Church together, not least in the Opus Dei prelature.

Starting in Spain, the prelature has invested a lot of time and energy in spreading the neoliberal doctrine there and in Latin America, for example by founding the elite Navarra Business School — as an antidote to liberation theology and in competition with the expanding Evangelical Free Churches. It is no surprise, then, that Gerd Habermann, head of the Hayek Society in Germany, works with the Catholic Business Federation (BKU) as part of the neoliberal Jena Alliance.

The branching out of the neoliberal and national conservative forces across continents and even into the Catholic Church shows that the full extent of the “neoliberal family” only becomes clear when we consider the respective national members in their transnational context. Javier Milei’s quick visit to the Hayek Society in Hamburg offered an excellent opportunity to do so.

Translated by Hanna Grześkiewicz and Joseph Keady for Gegensatz Translation Collective.