On October 19, addressing a gathering of oil and gas executives in the Patagonian province of Neuquén, Argentine President Javier Milei posed a rhetorical question that millions of citizens could have answered instantly.
“If they truly run out of money on the 20th, can you tell me how they live ten days without eating or drinking?”
The Argentine leader was mocking a widespread complaint that households run out of cash by the twentieth day of the month—a phenomenon he dismissed as a political fabrication concocted by the Kirchnerites, the followers of former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He characterized the assertion using a colloquialism, calling it a “pelotudez del tamaño de una casa,” which roughly translates to nonsense the size of a house.
The reality on the ground, however, is neither mysterious nor reassuring. People borrow. According to data from the Central Bank, household loans in arrears reached 12.81% in August, nearly doubling the rate recorded just a year earlier. In a recent poll conducted by the consultancy Equipo Mide, 53% of respondents reported taking out loans over the previous three months, with 39% stating that the borrowed funds were used specifically to buy food. Responding to the president’s remarks, Pablo Juliano, an opposition lawmaker from the Radical Civic Union (UCR), summarized the mechanism of survival in six plain words: “La respuesta es que se endeuda.” They go into debt.
More revealing than the dismissal itself was the underlying logic of Milei’s question. By his reasoning, if people are still managing to eat by the 30th day of the month, they cannot genuinely be out of money. Because severe economic distress becomes nearly impossible to officially establish short of absolute starvation, the administration finds it convenient to dismiss widespread complaints as political stunts orchestrated by critics.
Global Echoes: Discontent on the Streets of Europe
While Milei attributes domestic unrest to political opposition, he reads remarkably similar discontent abroad through an entirely different lens. On October 17, more than half a million people took to the streets across France, according to police estimates. What began as localized demonstrations by students and teachers protesting decaying school infrastructure rapidly snowballed into a broader national revolt over stagnant wages, pension reforms, soaring energy prices, and the relentless cost of living. While the vast majority of the French demonstrations remained peaceful, pockets of the movement turned volatile. Just a day prior, thousands of students had marched through major Italian cities to protest against the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, citing run-down school buildings and chronically insufficient educational funding.
Simultaneously, anti-government demonstrations gripped Albania. Days of protests against socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama fused long-standing grievances regarding public corruption, high unemployment, and inadequate education with fierce opposition to the sale of pristine coastal land to luxury developers. Among the controversial initiatives was a real estate project tied to a firm founded by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law.
Capitalizing on these international events, Milei took to social media on October 18 to ask whether his critics would finally admit he had been right all along about the inherent dangers of collectivism. He shared a video clip of his widely discussed 2024 speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he had warned global leaders that the Western world was under threat from socialist policies.
The ideological dichotomy in Milei’s perspective is striking: abroad, he interprets public anger over the cost of living as an inevitable indictment of governments that have failed their citizens through state intervention. At home, he treats virtually the same populist anger as a malicious invention of his political detractors.
Shared Demands Across Borders
Placing these international marches side by side reveals a striking convergence in the core demands of ordinary citizens. Across vastly different political landscapes, people are demanding functional public schools, wages that adequately cover their basic living expenses, pensions capable of supporting a dignified retirement, and a meaningful voice in the management of local land and natural resources.
None of these aspirations should sound foreign in Argentina, as they mirror the daily struggles of citizens navigating the current administration’s sweeping economic restructuring.
Consider the state of public education. While French and Italian students took to the streets over deteriorating classrooms, Argentine students and university staff staged a massive mobilization on October 15 through the streets of Buenos Aires to protest sweeping budget cuts to public higher education. Security forces deployed tear gas and rubber bullets near the National Congress building, resulting in at least 25 detentions. According to national budget figures compiled by the prominent fact-checking organization Chequeado, the higher education budget for 2026 is 25.3% smaller in real terms than it was in 2023. Concurrently, data cited in the same analysis indicates that university professors’ salaries sit 24.2% below their November 2023 levels.
A chemistry professor interviewed by international media outlets reported earning roughly US$700 a month under the current economic framework. These mounting losses in university funding and academic salaries have transpired as Milei’s administration aggressively trims public expenditure to achieve and maintain a zero-deficit fiscal balance. In 2025, the Argentine Congress successfully overrode a presidential veto to pass a dedicated university funding law, yet the executive branch has consistently declined to implement its key provisions. Although a federal judge penalized the cabinet chief with a daily fine of 100,000 pesos for non-compliance, an appeals court temporarily suspended the fine on October 15 while affirming that the underlying legal obligation to comply remains intact.
Parallels to Argentina’s domestic struggles can also be found in the land disputes seen in Albania. While Albanian protesters object to coastal territory being handed over to foreign corporate interests, Argentina experienced its own fierce battle over property rights when Milei repealed by executive decree a 2011 law capping foreign ownership of rural land at 15%.
Although a Supreme Court ruling on September 29 briefly reinstated the legal limits, the restrictions hung in legal limbo for roughly ten days until the Court suspended its own repeal on October 9. The administration ultimately agreed to codify land limits within a private property bill passed by the Lower House during its October 21 session. The amended legislation must still return to the Senate before it can be formally enacted into law, illustrating that even key legislative allies had previously pushed back against the complete removal of these historical restrictions.
Argentina’s broader cost-of-living metrics paint a complex and nuanced picture. Official data indicates that the national poverty rate climbed from 28.2% in the second half of 2025 to 32.3% in the first half of the current year, effectively breaking a streak of five consecutive semesters of decline. The cost of the basic food basket outpaced overall household income growth, rising 21.4% compared to an income increase of 11.5%. Meanwhile, unemployment ticked upward to 7.9%, marking the highest rate recorded since 2021.
These indicators require appropriate economic context. Poverty remains substantially lower than the 41.7% recorded when Milei first assumed office, and sits far below the alarming 52.9% peak reached in early 2024 in the immediate wake of a sharp devaluation engineered by his own government. Furthermore, inflation has slowed down dramatically from its previous hyperinflationary trajectory, and fiscal stabilization stands as a genuine policy achievement that the administration is entitled to defend.
Yet what the government cannot easily explain is why so many households continue to find their monthly incomes insufficient, or why the broader socio-economic recovery appears to have stalled.
Blaming the Welfare State
Supporters of the libertarian administration offer a coherent defense of these policies. European welfare states have operated under massive structural deficits for years—France’s deficit stood at 5.1% of gross domestic product last year—and the painful public spending cuts sparking European protests are the inevitable consequence of running out of borrowed money.
From this perspective, Argentina adjusted its economic course early to preemptively avert a similar sovereign disaster. This argument warrants serious consideration. However, explaining why a government can no longer afford unsustainable public expenditures is fundamentally different from concluding that the citizens voicing distress have no legitimate grievances.
A public university can suffer from severe underfunding even while the national treasury maintains a fiscal surplus. A retired worker can struggle to pay utility bills while macroeconomic inflation indicators trend downward. And a working-class family can easily run out of disposable money by the 20th day of the month without literally spending the remaining ten days starving in the streets.
The Pursuit of a Better Life
President Milei appears less interested in exploring what these domestic and international protests reveal about modern economic anxiety than in fitting them neatly into his preferred ideological framework. French protesters are expressing fury at a centrist president, Albanian demonstrators are opposing a socialist administration, Italian students are rallying against a right-wing leader who happens to be Milei’s political ally, and Argentines are marching against a self-described libertarian.
Although their immediate demands and the underlying political structures of their respective nations vary wildly, Milei interprets all four scenarios through a single lens: the systemic failure of collectivism.
When every diverse global event is automatically interpreted as confirmation of a pre-existing ideological theory, that theory risks losing its explanatory power. Milei has positioned himself so far toward one ideological extreme that even the frustrations of citizens living under governments of completely opposing political orientations are co-opted as evidence supporting his own governance model. As the old geographical adage suggests, from the North Pole, every single direction points south.
The mass demonstrations unfolding across Europe offered an opportunity to understand the underlying anxieties of his own domestic electorate. Citizens are not necessarily rejecting the principles of fiscal discipline or demanding a return to unsustainable subsidies; rather, many are simply asking a fundamental question: when will these acute economic sacrifices ultimately translate into a tangible improvement in their daily lives?
While Milei possesses a clear and data-backed narrative regarding structural deficits, inflation reduction, and the economic catastrophe Argentina narrowly avoided—achievements rooted in real policy successes—it does not entirely answer that core human question.
When the president asked Argentines on October 19 to explain how they manage to survive the final days of the month, the public’s answer could easily be found in the quiet reliance on credit cards, personal loans, postponed utility bills, and informal borrowing from relatives, accompanied by the daily calculation of which household expenses can be safely delayed.
Surviving until the 30th day of the month and genuinely making ends meet, as millions across the country know, are two entirely different realities.
