In Miami, Milei should find supportive Argentines as Hispanic voters shift right

When Argentine President Javier Milei arrives in Miami this week, he’ll find himself in the midst of thousands of fellow countrymen who voted overwhelmingly last year from South Florida to propel the right-wing populist to power back home.

In the November runoff for the presidency, Milei won 94% of the vote cast by Argentines living in Miami. Rejecting Milei’s center-left opponent, expats threw their support behind a norm-shattering politician often compared to former U.S. President Donald Trump, whose own standing among South Florida Hispanics has ballooned in recent years.

With Argentina undergoing major economic and political upheaval, the tsunami of support for Milei — albeit from ballots cast by a fraction of the 50,000 Argentines living in the region — serves as one example of how the politics of Latin America can shape the votes of the many thousands of immigrants who call South Florida home.

“Miami is a place full of people who fled bad governments, fled turmoil in other countries, and I think people naturally draw on that personal experience,” said Thomas Kennedy, an activist who was born in Argentina and is active in anti-Milei circles in South Florida. “It’s part of why the politics of Miami is what it is.”

Argentines account for only a small slice of South Florida’s vast Hispanic vote, an electorate made up of different waves of Cuban exiles and arrivals from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Guatemala and elsewhere across Latin America. But the right-wing populism taking root in a number of South American nations has paralleled Trump’s rise.

Consequently, South Florida has long occupied a unique role in American politics. Nowhere in the country have foreign politics and foreign policy played as determinative a role, said Guillermo Grenier, a professor of sociology at Florida International University.

“When presidential candidates come to South Florida, that’s where they give the foreign policy speech. They don’t do it in Ohio,” Grenier said. “We are a product of foreign policy.”

While most polling shows that Latinos across the country largely support Democrats and plan to vote for President Joe Biden in the upcoming election, Florida Hispanics have shifted rightward in recent years, particularly in Miami-Dade County, where a diverse cross-section of voters tracing their heritage back to Latin America has increasingly identified with Trump.

Argentina’s history and culture can inform the way that its immigrants vote in U.S. elections, according to University of Miami political science professor Laura Gómez-Mera, who was born in Argentina. For example, she said that some people’s views of U.S. politics were shaped by Peronist policies in Argentina that they deemed as excessively interventionist.

“By living in Miami and immigrating here, that’s already showing perhaps their disapproval of domestic politics,” said Gómez-Mera, though she noted that many Argentines had come here for economic opportunity and not because of their government.

When he visits Miami this week, Milei will meet with potential investors and Inter-American Development Bank officials, and later receive an award from The Shul Jewish Community Center in Surfside on Wednesday for his support for Israel. The visit also highlights the ties that Latin American leaders have with South Florida and the long-settled communities that left their home countries.

Embrace of Trump and Milei

While Argentine voters and experts note that the comparisons between Trump and Milei may be flawed from a policy perspective, some parallels are clear beyond their notable hairstyles: both men ascended to political power by casting themselves as outsiders intent on dismantling what they saw as corrupt bureaucracies and an entrenched political class. They are mercurial and employ confrontational political rhetoric.

During his presidential campaign, Milei, a libertarian economist who rose to prominence by appearing on talk shows and was later elected to Argentina’s Congress, pledged to wipe out the government deficit and to return Argentina to its previous prosperity.

He also painted the image of a political elite that plunders from the common people, which secured the support of many working-class voters that have typically backed the Peronistas. The strategy echoed that of Trump, who aimed to win over blue-collar American voters who had traditionally backed Democratic candidates.

The kinship between Trump and Milei is more than just implied. As he campaigned for the presidency last year, Milei and his supporters sported “Make Argentina Great Again” hats and t-shirts that nodded to Trump’s campaign slogan. On the sidelines of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington in February, Milei greeted Trump with a hug.

READ MORE: This could be a big deal in November. Here’s what’s driving Hispanic voters to the right

On a recent morning, 77-year-old Alberto Federico met with two fellow Argentines at Buenos Aires Bakery in North Beach, a neighborhood in Miami Beach with a notable Argentine population. Federico told the Miami Herald that corruption overran Argentina, and that Milei had pledged to clean house.

“In three months, you can’t fix what was 70 years of theft and corruption,” he said, referring to the dominance of the left-leaning Peronista movement during most of the 20th century in Argentina. “So you have to give it a chance.” He said Milei was “bringing forth a cultural revolution” and “more or less of the same school of thought” as Trump and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele.

Those who support both Trump and Milei view the candidates as outsiders hellbent on draining the swamp who can provide stability to both their homeland and their adopted country in an uncertain world.

“Under Trump, we didn’t have war. There was prosperity. Gasoline was cheap. The food was cheap. Today we have war with the whole world. The food is expensive. Gasoline is expensive,” said Federico.

There are still key differences between Trump and Milei. Trump has shapeshifted from political outsider to synonymous with the Republican establishment. He’s enmeshed in a web of criminal cases and civil inquiries. Meanwhile, Milei lacks support from Congress and provincial governors while he tries to push through sweeping fiscal reform, and isn’t saddled with the same kind of legal baggage as Trump, said Gómez-Mera.

Kennedy said that whether someone voted for Milei isn’t necessarily a good predictor of who they’ll vote for in the U.S. election. Trump, he noted, has campaigned on a protectionist message: safeguarding American intellectual property, returning manufacturing jobs to the U.S. and levying high tariffs on countries he sees as a threat.

Milei, on the other hand, has cast himself as unabashedly pro-free trade and has vowed to bring more foreign investment into his country.

“I think Milei and Trump may be similar in style and rhetoric at the surface level,” Kennedy said. “Obviously their political allies because they’re part of this far-right global movement. But they’re policies are also quite different.”

They ‘wanted to throw a grenade into the political class’

While Milei swept the vote in Miami last year, winning 4,256 of the 4,539 of votes cast, his victory back home in Argentina wasn’t as overwhelming. He received about 56% of the vote in the country’s presidential runoff compared to 44% for his opponent, former Economic Minister Sergio Massa.

Argentines who spoke to the Miami Herald said that, in part, Milei’s victory could be traced to Argentines being fed up with previous leaders.

“The people of Argentina — similar to a lot of Trump supporters — were just kind of sick of the status quo. They were sick of systemic corruption and the political discourse of the country,” said Kennedy, who previously served as a Democratic National Committee member from Florida. “I think a segment of the population wanted to throw a grenade into the political class and the political system, but they did it on behalf of a demagogue.”

Massa’s role as incumbent finance minister put him at disadvantage among many people who deemed his performance as poor, said Gomez-Mera.

Since coming into power, Milei has devalued the Argentine peso, laid off public sector employees and cut government funding for transportation, pensions and other services. Inflation skyrocketed his first month in office, although it appears to have since slowed down.

His policies haven’t come without consequence: One study found that the poverty rate reached 57%, the highest it’s been in two decades. Thousands of Argentines have protested Milei’s contentious austerity measures.

But his supporters, both in Argentina and abroad, say that it’s a bitter pill the country must swallow to get the economy back on track.

“He is now paying for the party that took place,” said Sergio Ceballos, who was at the bakery with Federico. “They had a party ... And now you have to pay for the party, which is the hardest part.”