“Why did Milei win?” “Milei. A story of the present”. “The Milei symptom, reflections for an Argentina in check” … At the Buenos Aires book fair, the president since the end of 2023 monopolizes titles and covers, suggesting a country that is still trying to understand.
Javier Milei, his words, his writings, his life, his entourage, his sister (and secretary general of the presidency), his economy … pamphlet books, investigations, biographies: at the 49th fair-one of the greatest literary meetings in Spanish language-around twenty works auscultate the outsider “anarcho-capitalist” which has turned argentine politics, regrowth.
And that is without counting the books dealing with Mr. Milei on the fringes, in the story or analysis of the rise of a new world right, or of authors who claim it, pulling arguments against the “WOKE culture” or the political “caste”.
“There are books (on Javier Milei) which can be journalistic, of investigation, also books closer to fiction, but all have to do with the search for explanations”, analysis for AFP the Argentine novelist Claudia Piñeiro.
For her, Javier Milei “is a character that everyone wants to understand, and a way of understanding it is through the stories that are told about him”.
– “Subject of the moment” –
“There are a lot of books on the subject, because it is sold,” simply analyzes Victoria Gerz, a 32 -year -old visitor who promotes her blankets with stylized books at the fair. “It is the president, and whether we are for him or not, he is the subject of the moment,” she said to AFP in a queue for the presentation of a biography of Mr. Milei.
At one of these talks, facing a packed room of a thousand people, Claudia Piñeiro co -fed a debate on the book of journalist Ernesto Tenembaum, “Milei. A story of the present”. Careful dissection of his ascent, through his influences, meetings, polemicist outings, long before his election as a deputy in 2021.
“The articulator of the anger of all”, become “in barely seven years, president then a kind of world celebrity (…) if we report the successes at the time invested, perhaps one of the most successful political careers in the history of humanity”, writes the author.
Mr. Tenembaum, during the debate, evokes the “scatological” attacks, the “will to submit” from the Head of State. Recently returned to journalists “that people do not hate enough,” he said in recent weeks.
-A majority of “Milei-Touture” 2025 undoubtedly has a critical tone, which the titles betray: “The pleasure of cruelty: Argentina in the time of Milei”, “disturbed”, “chainsaw and confusion” …
But in the narrow paths, between the 500 stands of the fair – which sees each fall over three weeks over a million visitors – hostile works close with calls for liberal or libertarian weapons.
– still sulky sales –
In the aftermath of the presentation of the book by Ernesto Tenembaum, the same room, just as full, listened to Agustin Laje, political scientist and theorist from the far right in the heart of the Milei galaxy, present his “globalism: social engineering and total control in the 21st century”.
Mr. Laje, who diagnoses “the twilight of the journalistic truth regime”, invited assistance to deliver the “cultural battle”, where “everyone has an active role to play (…) We are all on social networks, today everyone can be heard and has moral and political responsibility to do so”.
Unsurprisingly in a country that saves from crisis in crisis – with a head of state who prides himself on being “the first economist president of Argentinian history” – the economy is also invited to the fair, with politics never far.
Axel Kicillof, Peronist Governor (Center-Gauche) of the province of Buenos Aires, and one of the rare opponents a priori presidential in 2027, presents his book “Return to Keynes”, deliberate opposite to the phobia of Javier Milei to the state intervention economist, subject of one of his books, “unmask the Keynesian lie” (2018).
And despite the joyful bibliophile crowd at the fair, the book economy, it struggles to find a smile, reflecting 16 consecutive months of consumption in decline, under the effect of inflation and then budget austerity.
The president of the Organizing Book Foundation, Christian Rainone, stressed that despite a slight recovery in early 2025, “sales did not recover the fall of 30% of 2024”.
