As in the first two years of his term, in Davos, Javier Milei turned “on” the Argentine political year. His presentation sought not only to add a new chapter to the saga of his global positioning: it is clear that, in part, the fate of the Milei administration revolves around the planet trump and the valuation it receives from the United States. But also, as in 2024 and 2025, Milei used Davos to anticipate the focus of his local agenda.
Locally, Milei made clear the two new dimensions of his cultural battle version 2026. In both cases, it is indeed a deepening of his conception of the market economy. On the one hand, the fight against the identification between market capitalism and social injustice and the firm defense of the connection between capitalism, efficiency and ethics as the only possible basis for a just public policy.
In Davos, Milei assured the existence of a “deep link between morality and free markets.” Conversely, he presented deregulation as the only possible state policy within the framework of that just capitalism he dreams of.That is why the Techint case and it’s defeat in the tender for pipes for a gas pipeline in Vaca Muerta became the first emblem of the Milei Davos 2026 model: the award to a foreign company but with a better price is a clear presentation of the new advance of the Government in its economic vision. In that conception, any direct intervention by the State to benefit any actor in the Argentine market breaks the virtuosity of the just capitalism that Milei preaches, although in Argentine political tradition it may seem otherwise.
it is indeed a position-taking not only in terms of the macroeconomic “cultural war”: in the awarding of the tender to the Indian firm Welspun, the escalation of the government’s vision became palpable and material, that is, it affects the reality of investments, dollar flows, and the realization of a conception of “entrepreneurship,” the ”hero” of the just capitalism that Milei says he encourages: risk-taker, competitive and transparent.
It is no coincidence that the archetype of Milei’s deregulatory official,Federico Sturzenegger,went out on the social network X to give the political response to the decision that left out a national company and chose a foreign one. The central argument is devastating,especially for Techint: two revelations,according to Sturzenegger.First, that Techint offered 40 percent more than its competitor and upon learning this, it was
The Trump-Bessent rescue has arrived. What risk could we anticipate from his speech at Davos 2026?
First, the risk of getting carried away with their theoretical vision and disconnecting from Argentinian reality: both Milei, sturzenegger, and Reidel are prone to hyper-abstraction and a dehumanization of their vision. The extreme deregulation they promote, using the AI sector as an example, contradicts many key Milei policies, such as exchange rate control, and doesn’t hold up, on that massively amplified scale, even in capitalism as prosperous as it is indeed just. From this theoretical temptation turned blind ideology, divorced from everyday, achievable solutions, stems the second risk – a debate surrounding the Techint case were the government faces many contradictions. If the government finds so many justifications, some acceptable, for the gradual easing of currency controls, shouldn’t it also be gradual in its demands on local companies? Can Argentinian businesses compete on equal footing with foreign companies given Argentinian conditions, a tax and labor structure that still falls short of a free market? Is there time, in the case of workers’ realities, to wait for the long-term benefits Sturzenegger proposes regarding job creation and a general benefit to the Argentinian economy, even if the tender is awarded to a foreign company?
Techint appears to be the first “casualty” of the government’s cultural-economic war. With the Tierra del fuego regime, though, the Milei administration has been far less forceful and much more gradual and lenient.Within the Ministry of Deregulation, the feeling regarding that case is one of discomfort: ”You have to ask the President,” is the common response.
On the global front, milei’s third appearance at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland comes amidst a geopolitical shift offering two key data points…
