Javier Milei, the outsider who won Argentina’s primary election this week, is starting talks with the International Monetary Fund over the country’s $44 billion program, a key piece of policy that will need to be addressed by the next administration.
Milei said his sister and campaign manager Karina received a call from IMF officials to set up a meeting following an upset victory on Aug. 13, without giving details on the still-to-be scheduled encounter.
Read more: Milei’s Plan for Argentina: Dollarization, Scrapping Taxes
“We’re seeing how to approach the meeting,” he said Tuesday in an interview with local radio station Radio La Red. “We don’t have a problem taking on the program with the IMF because we have a hypothesis about the adjustment that is a lot tougher.”
Meeting different political leaders is part of the IMF’s regular approach for officials working on Argentina’s program, the fund’s largest. Before the primary vote, IMF representatives had already anticipated intensifying talks with opposition members to gauge how they’d want to address the $44 billion program, Bloomberg News reported last month.
An IMF spokesperson said such meetings are common.
“In the case of presidential candidates, these engagements also allow staff to better understand key aspects of future potential economic policies,” the IMF spokesperson told Bloomberg News.
Milei also said on Tuesday he would approach the program’s fiscal targets by slashing public spending from the political sector.
“The big difference in the program we are proposing is we are going to go against politics, the places where politicians rob,” he added.
--With assistance from Eric Martin.
(Updates with IMF comment in the fifth paragraph)
