The independence that is still yet to be conquered

Every July 9 tends to become a ceremony of historical evocation. Presidential speeches usually look back: they remember the feat of 1816, exalt the founding fathers, and appeal to national unity through references to the past. Javier Milei chose a different path.

His message in Tucumán was not simply a commemoration of the independence achieved more than two centuries ago. It was the presentation of a much more ambitious political idea: that the true task of this generation is to complete a second independence, the economic independence of Argentinians from the State.

This change of focus explains the entire speech.

From the beginning, Milei established a parallelism between the emancipation of 1816 and the reform process he has been promoting since December 2023. Just as the Congress of Tucumán broke political ties with the Spanish Crown so that the United Provinces could decide their own destiny, the Government argues that today freedom requires breaking with another form of dependency: that of a State that for decades concentrated resources, regulated economic activity, multiplied taxes, and financed its expansion through inflation and debt.

This is not merely a rhetorical comparison. It is a redefinition of the very concept of independence.

For much of the 20th century, Argentine politics identified the State as the main engine of development. The growth of public spending, regulatory expansion, monetary issuance, currency controls, and tax pressure were presented as instruments to achieve greater social justice. However, that model ended up generating chronic inflation, permanent fiscal deficits, loss of purchasing power, decline in investment, and an increasing dependency of millions of citizens on political power.

Milei's proposal is based on a completely different diagnosis.

The President argues that prosperity does not arise from a State that redistributes wealth, but from a society that can produce it in freedom. This idea resonates with a liberal tradition deeply rooted in Argentine history. Juan Bautista Alberdi maintained that economic freedom was an indispensable condition for national progress, while Alberto Benegas Lynch (h) has long reminded us that the State does not create wealth: it only manages resources previously generated by society. When politics disregards this principle, it ends up weakening precisely the productive capacity it aims to protect.

From this perspective, fiscal balance ceases to be a technical tool and becomes an institutional principle. It does not appear as a temporary measure aimed at stabilizing the economy, but as the limit that prevents the State from financing its growth through inflation, debt, or permanent tax increases.

This conceptual framework helps to understand why the President presented the main results of his management as part of the same process of economic liberation. The sustained fiscal surplus, the elimination of currency controls, the thousands of deregulations, the reduction of taxes, the recovery of mortgage credit, and the arrival of new investments were not presented as isolated achievements. They were presented as stages of an institutional transformation aimed at returning decision-making space to citizens and reducing the discretionary power of the State.

The same logic explains the place occupied by the Pacto de Mayo within the speech.

Two years after its signing, Milei stopped presenting it as a declaration of principles to turn it into the roadmap for the next stage of government. The inviolability of private property, permanent fiscal balance, labor reform, political reform, trade openness, reduction of tax pressure, and modernization of the Central Bank appear as pieces of the same institutional project aimed at consolidating an open, stable, and competitive economy.

In that sense, the speech was less about balance and more about a program.

While much of the political leadership tends to use patriotic dates to manage symbols, Milei chose to use them to explain where he intends to take the country in the coming years.

This difference also marks the contrast with Kirchnerism. It is not only about different economic policies, but about two opposing ways of understanding the role of the State. While the previous model considered public spending, monetary issuance, and state intervention as permanent instruments to organize the economy, the current Government argues that prosperity depends on limiting political power and expanding spaces for individual freedom.

The difference between the two projects, therefore, is no longer merely economic.

It is institutional.

It is philosophical.

And, above all, it is a difference regarding how each understands the relationship between the citizen and the State.

Perhaps the most important phrase of the entire night was also the simplest: "We want to be judged by the degree to which we manage to change the country."

He did not ask for a vote of confidence or emotional support. He proposed a concrete criterion for evaluating a management: the depth of the reforms carried out and their ability to modify institutions that, for decades, have fueled Argentine decline.

Perhaps that was the true novelty of the speech.

July 9 ceased to be merely a commemoration of the past to become an explanation of the future that the Government intends to build. Independence stopped being presented as a completed fact in 1816 to transform into a political and institutional process that, according to Milei, is still unfinished.

History will determine whether that project achieves the results it promises. But the conceptual change has already been proposed. For the first time in many years, a President used the main patriotic date to propose that the measure of a management should not be the magnitude of its promises, but the depth of the reforms capable of expanding the freedom of Argentinians.