A President-elect hooked up on TV

Comments

1. 

   Banquo

   August 27, 2023

   Mark, calling Javier Gerardo Milei ‘president-elect’ is factually incorrect. What Milei has won so far is a primary election. This makes him a front-runner for the presidential election proper, which takes place in October of this year, with a possible run-off election in November if no candidate gets over 50% of votes.

   Although Milei is well placed to pull off a win, this is far from certain. It depends on whether he can attract those who voted for other candidates. Patricia Bullrich, of the centre-right party Together for Change, came second, so Milei (who has been described as “far right”) has a good chance of winning over those voters. However, Bullrich’s voters may stick with her while those who voted for the Peronist Sergio Massa (of the Union for the Homeland Party) or for other candidates may baulk at voting for someone with very radical ideas, so they will switch to Bullrich instead, ultimately awarding her the keys to the presidential palace and leaving Milei as an also-ran.

   On your point about single world leaders, many have wondered whether what made Alfred Sant so odd when he was prime minister and leader of the opposition is the fact that he was not living with his wife any longer. Then again, Mark Rutte has been a very successful prime minister of the Netherlands and he is famously single too, so maybe Sant is just odd by nature (he does wear a wig, after all, which is a decidedly odd thing for any man to do). Rutte also goes around his country by bicycle, which one cannot imagine a Maltese prime minister doing, except maybe Simon Busuttil if he had ever won that position.

   But that’s the point. The Maltese seem to prefer a prime minister who is macho, and that should come with a wife. People were very unkind about the fact that Busuttil’s marriage had broken down. Labour trolls constantly circulated fake stories about him being gay, even though he was in a new relationship with another woman.

   Evidence does not suggest that a wife is absolutely necessary for success, but maybe it does help. Being alone can do strange things to the mind. Lots of priests seem to struggle with sexual frustration, for example (something which the Catholic Church seems to look away from rather than face with the obvious solution of letting them get married and be normal people).

   In 2013, and after 30 years of marriage, Lyudmilla Alexandra Putin divorced her husband Vladimir, reportedly because of his infidelity. Had she stayed with the Russian president and whispered sensible things in his ear at night, maybe he would have become less bored with himself, less paranoid, and maybe he would have been pleased with just being a family man rather than obsessed with how he will be remembered by history.

   I do not know how much monogamy is related to being Mediterranean or Latin, as you assert, but having another person in one’s life can really be a stabilising presence, and some of the more ‘out there’ world leaders certainly seem to need someone keeping them entertained enough to maybe not start a war, launch a coup, crash an economy, or whatever, so it is perhaps a good thing for Argentina and the world if Javier Milei settles down before becoming president.

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