On October 19, speaking to oil and gas executives in the Patagonian province of Neuquén, President Javier Milei asked a question that millions of Argentines could have answered for him.
“If they truly run out of money on the 20th, can you tell me how they live ten days without eating or drinking?”
He was mocking the idea that many Argentines run out of money by the 20th day of the month, a complaint he dismissed as an invention of the Kirchnerites, the followers of former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
The claim, he said, was a “pelotudez del tamaño de una casa,” roughly “nonsense the size of a house.”
The answer is neither mysterious nor reassuring. People borrow. Household loans in arrears reached 12.81% in August, almost double the rate of a year earlier, according to the Central Bank.
In a poll by the consultancy Equipo Mide, 53% of respondents said they had borrowed in the previous three months, and 39% of those said it was to buy food. Pablo Juliano, an opposition lawmaker from the Radical Civic Union (UCR, in Spanish), answered in six words in Spanish: “La respuesta es que se endeuda.” They go into debt.
The more revealing part was the question itself. By Milei’s reasoning, if people are still eating on the 30th, they cannot really have run out of money. Hardship becomes impossible to establish short of starvation, so he dismisses the problem as a Kirchnerite stunt.
Protests in Europe
He read the discontent he saw abroad very differently. On October 17, more than half a million people took to the streets across France, according to police estimates. What began with students and teachers protesting decaying schools grew into a broader revolt over wages, pensions, energy prices and the cost of living.
Most of it was peaceful, though some turned violent. The day before, thousands of students had marched through Italian cities against the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, over run-down school buildings and insufficient funding.
In Albania, days of protests against Prime Minister Edi Rama, a socialist, have combined complaints about corruption, unemployment, education and the sale of coastal land to luxury developers, including a project tied to a firm founded by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
On October 18, Milei asked on X whether his critics would admit he had been right again about the dangers of collectivism. He also shared a clip of his 2024 speech at Davos, where he had warned that the West was in danger from it.
Abroad, Milei reads anger at the cost of living as a verdict on governments that failed their citizens. At home, he treats much the same anger as an invention of his critics.
Similar demands
Put the marches side by side and the striking thing is how similar the demands are. People want schools that work, wages that cover their expenses, pensions they can live on and some say over the land and resources around them.
None of that should sound foreign to Argentines, because it describes their own daily struggles.
Start with education. While French and Italian students protested over their classrooms, Argentine students and university staff marched on October 15 through Buenos Aires against cuts to public universities.
Police used tear gas and rubber bullets near Congress, and at least 25 people were detained. The higher education budget for 2026 is 25.3% smaller in real terms than in 2023, according to national budget figures compiled by fact-checking site Chequeado. University teachers’ pay is 24.2% below November 2023 levels, according to Conadu figures cited in the same analysis.
A chemistry professor told Al Jazeera she earns around US$700 a month. These losses in university funding and salaries have occurred under Milei, as his government cut spending to eliminate the fiscal deficit. In 2025 Congress overrode Milei’s veto to pass a university funding law. The government has declined to apply key provisions. A federal judge fined the cabinet chief 100,000 pesos a day over it, though an appeals court suspended the fine on 15 October while the obligation to comply stands.
The dispute over land also has parallels in Albania and Argentina. Albanian protesters object to coastal territory being handed to foreign developers. In Argentina, Milei repealed by decree the 2011 law that caps foreign ownership of rural land at 15%.
A Supreme Court ruling on 29 September left no legal limit for about ten days, until the Court suspended the repeal again on 9 October. The government agreed to restore the limits in the private property bill approved by the Lower House in its October 21 session. The amended bill must return to the Senate before becoming law. Even government allies had resisted removing the restrictions.
Argentina’s cost-of-living record is more mixed. Poverty in Argentina rose from 28.2% in the second half of 2025 to 32.3% in the first half of this year, ending five consecutive semesters of decline. The basic food basket rose faster than household income, 21.4% against 11.5%. Unemployment is 7.9%, the highest since 2021.
These figures need context. Poverty remains well below the 41.7% when Milei took office, and far below the 52.9% peak of early 2024, which followed a devaluation his own government carried out. Inflation has fallen dramatically. Fiscal stabilization is a real accomplishment, and the government is entitled to defend it.
What it cannot easily explain is why so many households still cannot make their income last the month or why the improvement appears to have stalled.
Blaming welfare states
Milei’s supporters have a serious reply. European welfare states have run large deficits for years (France’s was 5.1% of GDP last year), and the cuts people march against are, they say, what comes when the money runs out.
Argentina, on this account, adjusted early to avoid the same fate. That deserves consideration. But explaining why a government cannot afford something is different from concluding that the people asking for it have no grievance.
A public university can be underfunded while the state runs a fiscal surplus. A pensioner can struggle while inflation falls. And a family can run out of money on the 20th day of the month without spending the next ten days starving.
A better life
Milei seems less interested in what these protests reveal than in where they fit on his ideological map. France’s protesters are angry at a centrist president, Albania’s at a socialist, Italy’s at a right-wing leader who is Milei’s own ally, Argentina’s at a libertarian.
Their demands are not identical, and neither are the politics behind them. Yet he can look at all four and conclude the same thing: collectivism has failed.
When every event confirms a theory, the theory has stopped explaining anything. He has placed himself so far toward one extreme that even the frustrations of citizens living under governments of the opposite persuasion become evidence for his own.
From the North Pole, after all, every direction is south.
The European marches could have told him something about his own electorate. People are not necessarily rejecting fiscal discipline or asking for every subsidy to come back. Many are asking a simpler question: when do the sacrifices translate into a better life?
Milei has an answer about deficits, inflation and the disaster Argentina narrowly avoided, and it rests on real achievements. It is not quite an answer to that question.
On October 19 he asked Argentines to explain how they get through the end of the month. They could tell him about credit cards, personal loans, postponed bills and money borrowed from relatives, and about the small calculations of which expenses can wait.
He might find that surviving until the 30th and making ends meet are not the same thing.
La entrada The view from the North Pole se publicó primero en Buenos Aires Herald.