Milei presents the 2025 budget to the Argentine Congress with "zero deficit" as a goal

He Argentine president, Javier Milei, On Sunday night, he presented his 2025 budget project to a half-empty Congress, which focuses on reducing the fiscal deficit by reducing state financing.

“The deficit was always a consequence of first thinking about how much to spend and then see how to finance it. We are going to do it the other way around, thinking first about how much we have to save, and then seeing how much we can spend,” Milei said during his speech, which was broadcast on national television, although he did not provide details about the project or forecasts for next year.

It is the first time that a president has attended Congress to present a budget and he did so in front of a half-empty chamber, as many opposition legislators left after considering the event to be “a staged performance.”

The ruling party, which is a minority in both chambers, The government has suffered two setbacks last week, with the annulment of a decree that granted reserved expenses to the state intelligence service and the approval of a law that updates the university budget, although Milei announced that she will veto the latter because she considers it to be in deficit.

“We will veto all projects that threaten fiscal balance, because we are not going to be complicit in defrauding the Argentine people to take a populist measure,” Milei said this Sunday.

However, the government managed to maintain its veto of the increase in pensions last week, in a session repudiated by thousands of protesters outside Congress, some of whom were repressed by the police.

The Government ended the first half of 2024 with a fiscal surplus of 0.4% of GDP, amid a collapse in consumption, which fell by more than 15% so far this year according to business chambers, with 236% year-on-year inflation and nearly half of the population in poverty.

“We are not exaggerating when we say that we did the largest adjustment in human history“, Milei said.

At the end of his speech, opposition deputy Leandro Santoro told C5N that “what the president is showing today is that he does not care about the people.”

In his speech of about 30 minutes, the ultraliberal Milei vHe once again outlined his vision of a national State focused on macroeconomics and security and reiterated that “there is no worse way to spend than state spending.”

“The fundamental thing that a national state has to do is to ensure macroeconomic stability, foreign relations and the rule of law. Period. Any other issue can be resolved through the market, or is the responsibility of subnational governments.”

The budget project must first be discussed by the budget committee of the Chamber of Deputies.