Argentina's Milei Repels Women Voters, Fires Up Disgruntled Men

In Argentina, where women have made some recent gains but are still fighting for full equal rights, anti-establishment presidential candidate Javier Milei has divided the electorate with an unashamedly machismo stance.

Some love him for it. Others are appalled.

The libertarian outsider who unexpectedly surged to the front of the presidential race in an August primary, had a poorer-than-expected showing in Sunday's first election round, coming second behind center-left candidate Sergio Massa.

"There was a very strong mobilization of women against Milei," whose rhetoric "was not only anti-feminist but also anti-woman," political scientist Ivan Schuliaquer of the San Martin University in Buenos Aires told AFP.

Milei does not hold back when it comes to chauvinistic tropes.

"I'm not going to be apologizing for having a penis!" he said in an interview last year.

Milei is antiabortion -- a right granted to Argentine women only in 2021 -- does not support equal pay and has suggested scrapping the women's ministry if he becomes president.

On the question of femicide, he has demanded "equality before the law" -- meaning that targeting a victim for their gender should stop being considered an aggravating circumstance in sentencing.

Over 250 women fell victim to femicide in Argentina in 2022.

While many women are alarmed, Milei's utterances have found resonance with some men, and polls show his voters were mainly male.

"There has been a lot of patriarchal reaction to Milei's ideas," leftist presidential candidate Myriam Bregman said on national radio after garnering less than three percent of the vote Sunday.

"They (Milei's male supporters) feel their privileges are being brought into question."

At Milei's final campaign rally, a supporter told AFP that feminists in Argentina "sound like a broken record."

The supporter, 57-year-old manual laborer Moises Achee, said he was also "against them changing the Spanish language" to make provision for gender inclusive pronouns.

"I don't want them to impose things on me that I don't accept... So we go with Javier Milei!".

Argentina has been a Latin American leader in gay marriage and identity legislation, with a 2021 law allowing non-binary people to mark their gender with an "X."

Abortion, too, has been legal in the country since 2021 until the 14th week of pregnancy.

In September this year, with Milei on the up and up in opinion polls, thousands of Argentine women marched in defense of abortion, a right they feared he would take away.

The feminist movement gained prominence in Argentina in 2015 with massive countrywide protests against femicide.

The push for abortion came later, and the so-called "green tide" named after the green bandannas donned by demonstrators, subsequently spread across Latin America and beyond.

"Argentina is the door to the fight for human rights in the region," said Soledad Vallejos, a journalist specializing in gender issues who helped found the anti-femicide movement "Ni Una Menos."

As such, if conservatives "can change the minds of Argentines, (this too) will spread across the region," she told AFP.

The emergence of the "green tide" had a strong counter-reaction in Argentina, igniting an angry clapback in conservative, and male, sectors that took to WhatsApp groups and social media in anger.

"There was an overreach of feminism in whose eyes you were guilty just for being a man," Milei's director of digital communication, Agustin Romo, told elDiarioAR, an online newspaper, in August.

This, in turn, elicited a reaction "even in nonideological men and women. Or in women who realized they had gone overboard," ventured Romo, a former online influencer.

As voices became more and more divided in the period from 2017 to 2019, a libertarian economist became a popular guest on Argentine TV, generating good ratings with his sometimes radical rants. It was Milei.

Then came the Coronavirus pandemic and the fight over vaccine and mask mandates -- further uniting the anti-establishment crowd.

According to philosopher Ricardo Forster, Milei's "seemingly rebellious" discourse, so attractive to people who feel marginalized in an increasingly polarized world, was in fact a "deeply reactionary" harkening for old-fashioned, conservative values.

"Something about masculinity is at stake... that is expressed in the growth of the extreme right in many parts of the world," Forster told the Perfil newspaper, comparing the Milei phenomenon with Donald Trump in the United States and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro.

For Schuliaquer, while the divide between Argentina's traditional rival parties used to be one of class, the pending political contest between Milei and the incumbent Peronist movement will be one of "gender and generation."