Javier Milei had English mastiff Conan cloned when he died and his sister trained as a medium to talk to the pet.
Javier Milei, a libertarian economist and former tantric sex teacher who has said he communicates with a beloved dead dog named Conan, became Argentina’s president-elect on Sunday, vowing to do away with government corruption and turn the country into a global power in his victory speech.
Running on the La Libertad Avanza — Liberty Advances — ticket, he beat Sergio Massa, the current economy minister, 55.7 to 44.3 in the runoff election and will take office next month.
Milei, 53, ran a shock campaign against Massa, the Peronist establishment candidate, promising to adopt the dollar and abandon the peso to stem 124 per cent inflation as well to re-criminalize abortion and to privatize the country’s rivers as a way to stop pollution.
The populist has been compared to former President Trump, with supporters wearing Make Argentina Great Again caps, and has promised to take a figurative chainsaw to corruption and the country’s bloated bureaucracy, wielding one on the campaign trail.
At the last minute he ditched a promise to allow free markets in human organs and in children, who he had previously said were “being trafficked anyway.”
The populist also scaled back some of his most inflammatory rhetoric in a campaign ad before Sunday’s vote: “We’re not going to privatize healthcare. We’re not going to privatize education. We’re not going to privatize soccer. We’re not going to allow the unrestricted carrying of weapons.”
Tousle-haired Milei has reveled in his nicknames “The Wig” and “The Lion” for his luxuriant locks, and as a teenager was known as “El Loco,” or “the madman” for his outbursts on and off the soccer field, a nickname he has also embraced.
And he has made his love of his deceased dog Conan, a 200lb English mastiff, a centerpiece of his populist rise, holding up a painting of the pet on the campaign trail.
He had Conan cloned in upstate New York after its death in 2017.
