Argentina, May 2025, one day before parliamentary elections. Libertarian influencers aligned with Javier Milei began sharing two videos on social media in which the opposition leader, Mauricio Macri, and the opposition candidate for Buenos Aires, Silvia Lospennato, announced the sudden withdrawal of their list and urged voters to support Milei’s candidate. They explained that, as this decision had just been made, the ballot still showed their list, but they encouraged voters to ignore it and vote for Milei’s candidate.
The videos were fake, AI-crafted, although they looked convincing enough to be mistaken for real. Millei’s government officials did not hesitate to distribute them on social media. Macri’s and Lospennato’s lists lost the elections.
While this is already quite serious, as it involves electoral fraud, the worst part was Millei’s reaction. When asked by the press on election day, he said that Macri was a “llorón”, a “whiner” made of “pure cristal”, alluding to him being weak for not understanding that lying and committing fraud are part of the game in today’s democratic race to power.
When asked by the press on election day, he said that Macri was a “llorón”, a “whiner” made of “pure cristal”, alluding to him being weak.
Countries with marginal economies have historically served as testing grounds for the boundaries of democracy and media manipulation. We might think that an event like this causes no significant harm to the broader world outside Argentina. But it does, as it illustrates how to govern a country and create public debates that exploit malicious uses of the only political system that can afford to grant freedom of expression to everyone who wants to take part. If it happened in Argentina, it can happen elsewhere. If it happens elsewhere, modern democracy might become so complex to implement that it may struggle to compete against authoritarian regimes. And, for me, coming back to the times of kings and emperors is not appealing at all.
What to do (or not do) to systematically change the direction in which these negative forces are blowing?
Ironically, just a few months before the event, in January, Millei was speaking at Davos, saying that Argentina was an “example of a new way of doing politics, which is about telling people the truth to their faces.” I suppose he was truly lying, just as I might simply be whining about it.
