Argentina’s Milei heads to Paris to attract investment

President Javier Milei will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron when he travels to Paris this week to oversee a forum aimed at luring investment in Argentina, the government said Sunday.

The trip comes as the Argentine economy is showing signs of stagnation, with a 0.6% drop in GDP in the second quarter compared to the previous three-month stretch.

It also comes a week after Milei slammed Europe as a slave to regulation, immigration and “woke” thinking, saying in an interview with French broadcaster LCI that Europeans disliked his ally Donald Trump because he tells the “truth about how it is sinking.”

Milei, a firebrand libertarian who calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, will give a speech Thursday at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and meet later that day with Macron, according to the agenda released the government.

Milei leaves Tuesday for Paris to lead a government delegation at the forum called “Argentina Week”, which runs from Sept 30 to Oct 2.

Since taking power in 2023 and taking an ax to government spending, Milei managed to cause a budget surplus and tame triple digit inflation, bringing it down to annual rate of 35%.

But three years of austerity have sapped the industrial sector, employment and consumption in Latin America’s third largest economy.