President Javier Milei’s public invectives directed at political opponents and his speech at the World Economic Forum have continued to spark backlash a week later, from social media denouncements to criminal complaints. On Monday, four opposition deputies from the Peronist coalition Unión por la Patria (UxP) filed draft bills calling on Congress to condemn the president’s statements. 

“This is barbaric. We are seeing the true Milei, no one can be fooled by him anymore,” Deputy Eduardo Valdés, who presented a draft bill decrying ideological persecution by the president, told the Herald.

‘A breaking point’    

“Leftists sons of bitches, tremble, liberty is moving forward,” Milei wrote on January 21 in an X post in which he backed South African businessman and newly appointed U.S. government official Elon Musk after he made what appeared to be a Nazi salute at President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

“We will hunt them down to the last corner of the planet in defense of FREEDOM,” Milei added.

In his call for fellow legislators to condemn Milei’s post, Valdés said that “it is outrageous that in a country that has suffered state terror […] a democratically elected president dares to promote this discourse of persecution against ideological opponents yet again.” Valdés posted on his X account that 47 UxP deputies have cosigned the draft bill. 

While speaking at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on January 23, the President linked the fight for gender equality and the LGBTQIA+ community — for which he used the charged anti-trans term “gender ideology” — to sexual child abuse. “In its most extreme version, gender ideology simply and plainly constitutes child abuse. They’re pedophiles,” Milei said. He also claimed that the crime of femicide meant that the law recognized a woman’s life is worth more than a man’s.

The president later doubled down in an X post, saying people were accusing him of things he “never said” and claiming to defend “people’s freedom to choose their life project” after his comments were lambasted as homophobic and misogynistic.

“Milei reached a breaking point. What can possibly come after this?” Valdés said.

UxP Deputy Roxana Monzón also filed a draft bill condemning Milei’s Davos speech specifically, highlighting choice selections from the speech, including anti-immigrant statements. She wrote that they were “violent, aggressive, offensive, antidemocratic, stigmatizing and discriminatory” and went against Argentina’s active defense of human rights on the world stage.

Criticisms across the aisle

Some La Libertad Avanza allies also criticized Milei’s controversial comments from last week. Unión Cívica Radical, a party that belongs to the so-called “friendly opposition,” called his statements “abhorrent” and demanded the president stop “aggravating those who think differently” and “spreading fake news.”

“It’s time for the president to leave behind his imaginary wars and desire for international leadership and return to the country to fulfill the role he was voted to carry out,” they wrote in a statement released on Thursday while Milei was still in Switzerland.

Deputy Silvia Lospennato from the PRO party, Milei’s biggest ally in Congress, wrote in an X post on Sunday that while she defends the government’s economic measures, she also defends policies that promote diversity and equality. “That liberal, open, tolerant, and meritocratic Argentina is what I dream of for my daughters and to all those who chose the best country in the world to live in and progress.”

A PRO source told the Herald that the party did not discuss the issue and that each member expressed their ideas freely. Regarding concerns about potential setbacks on gender policies, the source said if the government attempts to make legislative changes, Congress has “enough votes to uphold policies such as the femicide law.”

Criminal complaints and protests

Socialist Deputy Esteban Paulón and the Argentine LGBT+ Federation (FALGBT, by its Spanish initials) have filed criminal complaints. The organization accused the president of “discriminatory comments, threats, and public intimidation” and also requested a “preventive habeas corpus” to protect all people who defend human rights in Argentina.

“Blaming diversity or the LGBT+ agenda for child sexual abuse […] is as absurd as saying that heterosexuality is to blame for the numerous child abuse cases in which the aggressors are, mostly, heterosexual,” FALGBT wrote in a social media statement last week.

Argentina’s LGBTQIA+ community had already gone beyond social media in response to the president’s speech, gathering in public assemblies across the country on Saturday. The largest one was in Buenos Aires, in Parque Lezama, with an estimated 8,000 attendees. A popular vote in those countrywide assemblies decided to carry out a federal anti-fascist, anti-racist pride march on Saturday, February 1.

Celebrities such as singers Lali Espósito, Cazzu, and Natalie Pérez, journalist and presenter Diana Zurco, child entertainer Diego Topa, and TV host Flor de la Ve questioned Milei’s statements and called on people to join the march.