In weeks like this it would be easy to believe the onward march of the populist right is unstoppable. On Sunday, Javier Milei, a libertarian politician known as El Loco (The Madman) was elected President of Argentina, while on Thursday the anti-immigration Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders became the largest party in the Dutch Parliament.

Milei’s public image has been consciously modelled as a mash-up of Elvis Presley and the Marvel character Wolverine. He became famous for wielding a chainsaw on the campaign trail to symbolise his role as a political disruptor and began his rise to notoriety as a TV economist who would also talk about the joys of tantric sex. He has been known to dress up as the self-styled “superhero” General Ancap (Anarcho-Capitalist) to advertise his economic credentials as a free-market fundamentalist.

But as Amy Booth writes for Index this week, Milei is no joke. His electoral campaign was marked by attacks on publicly-owned media and his supporters have been trolling LGBTQ activists, who opposed his candidacy.

In a troubling turn of events, Milei has begun to play down the scale of the atrocities committed under the right-wing junta ousted after the Falklands War in 1983. Human rights groups estimate at least 30,000 people were disappeared, tortured or murdered during the seven-year period of military rule. Milei’s opponents have been sent sinister photographs of the iconic green Ford Falcon cars used to snatch the regime’s victims.

Index has a long history of work on Argentina. Booth is the managing editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, whose former editor, Andrew Graham-Yooll, was editor of Index from 1989 to 1994 and a contributor before that. In 1973 Graham-Yooll concluded his Letter from Argentina: “Censorship in Argentina is not a sin of the State, but a sickness of society. The cure is that somebody should stand up and scream the warning that the rot is within, that the truth must be told - even if it is each his own truth - in full. But you are afraid for your own safety if you shout too loud.” The people of Argentina will be hoping the sickness has not returned 50 years later.

Javier Milei remains something of an unknown quantity, but the Dutch politician Geert Wilders is all too familiar. His presence on the political scene is a continued challenge to supporters of free expression. Long-standing Index supporters will be aware of Wilders ever since he was banned from entering the UK in 2009 after making a film, Fitna, deemed by the British government to be anti-Muslim. The work showed verses of the Koran intercut with acts of violence carried out by Muslims and argued that Islam encouraged misogyny, homophobia and terrorism. The UK Home Office issued a letter saying: “The Secretary State is satisfied that your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the UK.”

The celebrated barrister Geoffrey Robertson wrote in Index at the time: “He was invited to Parliament to speak to a few UKIP MPs – a case, surely, of shouting fire in an empty theatre. But the banning gained him enormous publicity and made him very popular in the Netherlands.”

Populists such as Wilders thrive on liberal outrage and Robertson was right to warn against overreaction. Wilders moderated his language in the recent Dutch election campaign, but there remain serious concerns about his anti-immigrant stance. As is often the case with free-speech radicals of the right, Wilders does not seem as keen to extend the right of self-expression to Muslims who might wish to express their religious faith in ways he finds unacceptable.
 
Martin Bright, editor at large

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