On Wednesday, as Javier Milei shook hands with Donald Trump in Washington at the American president's self-styled Peace Council summit, the streets of Buenos Aires and cities across Argentina told a different story. The Casa Rosada stood largely empty while the country's largest labor federation called its workers home. The split screen — president abroad, nation in revolt — captures the defining tension of Milei's presidency with unusual clarity.
The Confederación General del Trabajo (CGT), Argentina's dominant labor federation and one of the most institutionally durable forces in the country's politics, called a full 24-hour general strike to coincide with the congressional debate on Milei's labor reform bill. By morning, the effects were visible: bus lines running at reduced frequency, construction sites silent, port workers absent. The DOTA bus operators — notably — kept partial service running, with some drivers declaring publicly that "this country is built by working," a line that ricocheted across social media and illustrated the fractures within organized labor itself.
The coercive edge of the CGT's mobilization surfaced through video footage that circulated widely across Argentine social media Wednesday. Delegates from the UOCRA, the construction workers' union, were filmed confronting laborers at work sites. "It is absolutely forbidden to come to work tomorrow," a union delegate can be heard saying, in language that blurred the line between solidarity and intimidation. The footage became an instant flashpoint, with government supporters citing it as evidence of precisely the labor-market distortions Milei's reform is designed to dismantle, while union defenders argued the footage was being weaponized to delegitimize a constitutionally protected collective action.
Back in Washington, Milei's participation in Trump's Peace Council — a diplomatic forum convened around Ukraine ceasefire diplomacy — carried its own symbolic weight. La Nación reported that the Argentine president flew to the summit on what his own government acknowledged was "a hot day" at home, a frank admission that the timing was freighted. The decision to travel abroad while a general strike paralyzed the country was not accidental: Milei's team has framed his international posture — the alignment with Trump, the rejection of multilateral bodies perceived as ideologically left-leaning — as integral to the economic transformation project, not peripheral to it.
The Milei-Trump axis has been carefully cultivated since before Milei's election in November 2023. Both men share an ideological affinity — radical market libertarianism crossed with political anti-establishmentarianism — that has made their alignment more than ceremonial. For Milei, proximity to Trump carries practical weight: it signals to international markets and the Washington financial establishment that Argentina is a reliable partner in the new American orbit, potentially smoothing the path for IMF negotiations and bilateral trade arrangements that are central to his stabilization strategy.
The domestic stakes, meanwhile, were playing out in the Chamber of Deputies. Congress achieved quorum Thursday to begin debating the labor reform, a procedural milestone that the government had not taken for granted given its minority status in both chambers. La Libertad Avanza controls no legislative majority; every vote is assembled through coalition negotiations with Mauricio Macri's PRO party and moderate Peronist legislators from provincial blocs whose cooperation is transactional. The government had already stripped the reform's most toxic provision — a curtailment of sick-leave entitlements — in a concession made to secure those votes.
What remains in the bill is still significant. The reform proposes restructured collective bargaining frameworks, new employment contract categories designed to reduce hiring costs, adjusted indemnification formulas that the government argues are a prerequisite for formal employment growth, and provisions targeting the country's vast informal labor sector. The administration frames these as structural corrections to four decades of Peronist labor law accumulation. The CGT frames them as the dismantling of protections won through generations of organizing.
The Peronist opposition bloc — Unión por la Patria — signaled it would vote against the reform regardless. But the government's target was never the Kirchnerists. It was the centrist provincial legislators who read their constituencies' anxiety about unemployment and precarious work, and who demanded the sick-leave provision's removal as the price of their support.
In Argentina, as across nations blessed and cursed by potential, the gap between what could be and what is defines the national psychology. Milei came to power on the most radical economic mandate in Argentine history — a promise to chainsaw a state that had, through decades of populist expansion, produced the inflation, poverty, and recurring crisis that now define Argentine daily life. Annual inflation, while declining from its peak above 200 percent, remains deeply elevated. Poverty has climbed during the adjustment period. The peso's stabilization has come at significant social cost.
Whether the general strike represents a genuine popular verdict on Milei's project, or a rearguard action by institutional labor defending privileges that have structurally harmed Argentina's least protected workers, is the question that Argentine society is answering in real time. Wednesday's images — construction sites silent, a president in Washington, congresspeople counting votes — offered no resolution. They offered only the spectacle of a country in argument with itself, which is, in a sense, the most Argentine thing of all.
