Argentine society unites and puts a stop to Javier Milei: “Public education is not touched”

The hundreds of thousands of people who demonstrated throughout Argentina against the university adjustments let the Government know that education is a right that they are not willing to give up.

President Javier Milei accused the coup and promised to guarantee funds for the operation of national universities.

Why were the marches of April 23 historic and what is hidden behind Milei’s rejection of public education?

“Tears of left-handers.” That was the first response of the Argentine president, Javier Milei, to the massive marches that took place last Tuesday, April 23, throughout the country in defense of public education. With those three words written on his social networks, the far-right president once again positioned the debate on free access to education as an ideological and partisan issue.

But, in the streets, the historic demonstrations rejecting the Government’s budgetary adjustment to national universities demonstrated that the defense of public education has no political colors.

“I voted for Milei, but public education is not touched. Why change one of the few things that work well in this country?” asks Claudia, a graduate of the Faculty of Law of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) who participated in the mobilization that took place in the Argentine capital and attended by some 800,000 people, according to the organizers.

Claudia’s case is just one of many. The marches genuinely brought together people from different political parties who let the Government know that education is a right that they are not willing to give up.

Even journalists from more conservative positions were critical of Milei’s educational policy.

Milei “gathered people who were not united in a protest”

Journalist Eduardo Feinmann, a former UBA student, said on his ‘La Nación +’ program that he would have liked to attend the march. Later, in a column for ‘Infobae’, he accused the Government of “minimizing and discrediting the protests.”

“The adherence of certain questionable political leaders to the cause has not been able to overshadow the fact that the true leading voice has been that of the people: students who regularly march and those who rarely join protests, university and non-university citizens, entire families , with children, parents and grandparents included. The demonstration has not been a political act, but rather a popular cry,” the lawyer who graduated from the UBA stated in ‘Infobae’.

Along the same lines, political scientist Leandro Cahn highlighted the diversity of the claim.

“It was so massive, so diverse, so multi-class, so multi-party, so happy, so calm and so clear in the claim, that it doesn’t matter what they say about the number or who they called. There were so many of us that we know what she was like. Let them be left talking to themselves,” the executive director of the Huésped Foundation wrote in his X account.

In this regard, in dialogue with France 24, the graduate in Biological Sciences from the UBA and specialist in Education and Technology (FLACSO) Javier Jamui believes that Milei, unintentionally, “gathered in a protest people who were not united, including everyone the arch of the opposition and even people who voted for him.”

That his voters have demonstrated in defense of public universities is, for the education expert, a warning that “he cannot do everything he wants without going through Congress and without society endorsing it.”

“This is a mark, a turning point and a limit on some issues that were already resolved in Argentine society. Public education is a value. Conicet – a government agency dedicated to the promotion of science and technology in Argentina – is an institution valued worldwide. The UBA, with all its shortcomings, is a place respected and loved by society,” adds Jamui.

However, the Government insists that it was a partisan mobilization. This was expressed by the presidential spokesperson, Manuel Adorni, in one of his usual press conferences.

Although he recognized that it was a “genuine” demonstration of society, he accused political leaders of turning it into an “opposition political march.”

He also assured that the Government has no intention of closing public universities and that what they are looking for is to audit them.?

“Only quality public education is sustainable on the path we are traveling, the balance of public accounts and, of course, the audits that we deem appropriate in order to understand a little about how the funds are used,” said the spokesperson. presidential, on April 24.

Milei and her rejection of public education

The day after the marches, the president promised to “guarantee funds for the operation of universities.” And, like Adorni, he said his government will audit how those funds are used.

“Because that money arises from the effort made by the majority of Argentines who live below the poverty line and cannot and should not be used to fatten the pockets of some who have made a business out of public education,” he wrote in his account of

The announcement is a clear sign that the Government took the bullet after the massive demonstrations throughout Argentina.?

In any case, it is known that Milei does not support public education. She has repeatedly accused her of “indoctrinating” and “brainwashing.” She considers that the best model is the private one and her ideal is to introduce a voucher system for university education, like the one implemented in Chile during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

At a meeting of businessmen on March 26, he assured that “public education in Argentina has done a lot of damage by washing people’s brains.”

He also denounced “indoctrination” at the UBA and persecution against the institution’s students aligned with his party, the far-right La Libertad Avanza.

“He messed with the wrong enemy.”

The dean of the Faculty of Exact Sciences of the UBA, Guillermo Durán, described the liberal president’s accusations as “absurd.”

“At the University of Buenos Aires all voices are heard and all authors are studied. There are political freedoms of all kinds, any ideology can be defended. “All ideologies are on the table and everyone defends the one they like the most, with absolute freedom,” he told France 24.

As a defender of anarcho-capitalism, Milei resists state intervention in the economy. His ideology advocates a significant reduction in the role of governments in the public sphere.

In any case, sociologist Lucía Cavallero believes that Milei’s crusade against public universities “is not only given by ultra-neoliberal policies that aim to reduce the fiscal deficit and cut the budget.”

“There is a particular cruelty towards the public university because it is identified by the extreme right as a space for indoctrination,” the Sociology graduate and UBA researcher explains to France 24.

“The market totalitarianism of which we are victims identifies any space that has or gives the possibility of thinking outside of a commercial logic as a place of indoctrination,” he adds.

For his part, for the sociologist, teacher and researcher at Conicet Diego Murzi, the critical thinking that emerges from public universities is not to the liking of the president.

“It is not functional to neoliberal projects and, in this case, those of the right or extreme right. There is an idea that it is financing sectors that are very critical of this government and what it represents,” he explains to France 24.

Along these lines, sociologist Karin Davidovich points out that public faculties stimulate critical thinking and that the Government takes it as a “threat to its authority.”

“Milei confuses critical thinking with indoctrination,” the graduate in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and a PhD in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University tells France 24.

While for the doctor in Social Anthropology (UBA) and Conicet researcher José Garriga Zucal, the president sees education as an expense instead of an investment.?

“Public education and the science and technology system are investments, but the president understands them as an expense that, furthermore, he cannot understand due to an ideological issue. That question has to do with how he speaks for his tribune, how he speaks to those convinced that we, those of the science and technology system, are all left-handed people who study things that are of no use,” he tells France 24.

According to the anthropologist, Milei’s problem is that “he dialogues with actors who think more or less the same as him and who do not have much basis,” which makes it difficult to debate what is useful and what is not.

Sociologist Davidovich maintains, for her part, that society’s massive response against the university adjustment showed that Milei chose the “wrong enemy.”

“We’ll see if this is a lesson. In any case, the Argentine people have already sent him a message: public education is not negotiated,” she concludes.