The march on 1 February was a diverse mobilization that cut across class divides and brought together all those affected by Milei’s policies.
Javier Milei’s far-right government has pushed millions into poverty and is set to destroy public institutions and social rights in Argentina. So far, opposition parties and trade unions have failed to lead a strong response against his policies. But a new movement lead by the LGBTQ+ community stood up to Milei, calling for nation-wide antifascist, antiracist action. Might this be a turning point in Argentina’s opposition to the far-right?
This past February 1 2025, cities across Argentina’s 23 provinces saw the country’s first ever nation-wide, antifascist, antiracist Pride march. The call for the march had only emerged a week earlier, in response to the president’s speech at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. Among other insults and attacks on women and minorities, Milei insinuated that homosexuality leads to child abuse: “when I say abuse it is not a euphemism, because in its most extreme versions, gender ideology constitutes outright child abuse. They are paedophiles.” (Note that far-right pundits in the UK are using the same language on GB News).
1 February was a call to protect the freedoms and hard-won rights of women and LBTQI+ people, not just for the sake of those directly affected, but because those rights and freedoms define an idea of what Argentinian society is.
The final straw
The president’s remarks sparked outrage from the LGBTQ+ community, the opposition, and society more broadly. Just two days later, thousands of people gathered in Buenos Aires in a self-organised assembly that decided to call for a federal, antifascist, antiracist pride march.
The movement grew exponentially from there. Public sector workers officially joined the call. So did human rights organizations, and then trade unions followed. A range of sectors from environmentalists to scientists, antiracist collectives and public figures came out in support of the march with a clear message: the fight against fascism concerns us all.
The march also sparked actions in support across the Americas and Europe, including in London, where members of the Argentine diaspora responded to a call by the Argentina Solidarity Campaign and joined the counter-march against Tommy Robinson to bring attention to the international nature of the far-right turn.
The many reasons for marching
While the mobilization in Argentina was triggered in response to Milei’s abhorrent speech in Davos, the reasons for marching were many: from making a stand against the government’s dehumanising discourse, to protecting hard-won rights and legislation (e.g. the gender identity law, the right to abortion and the legal framework on femicide). An overarching reason was to oppose the extreme austerity and dismantling of state institutions that has already had dire effects and could change the structure of Argentinian society for the long-term.
In the opening words to the assembly that gave birth to the march, the organisers said: “We believe that they [the government] fuel moral judgements, resentment and misunderstanding […] to hide their economic plan of extermination.” Similarly, the Ni una Menos feminist movement stated on social media that Milei’s spectacles abroad aim to cover the destructive effects of his policies. They added that Saturday’s march was against hunger, fascist hatred, extractivism, and to put an end to the transfer of territories to foreign entities, the growing foreign debt, and cheap privatization.
It was a first for Argentina, as the flags of antifascism and antiracism had never fronted nation-wide demonstrations before. Also, it was unusual, perhaps a first, for a march called by the LGBTQ+ community to gain the adhesion of all major trade union centrals.
Until now, the largest demonstrations since Milei came to power had been in defence of public higher education, and they had been successful in bringing large numbers to the streets and containing Milei’s targeted attack on public universities. The march on 1 February, however, seems different in some ways. It was a first for Argentina, as the flags of antifascism and antiracism had never fronted nation-wide demonstrations before. Also, it was unusual, perhaps a first, for a march called by the LGBTQ+ community to gain the adhesion of all major trade union centrals.
Underneath what some might misread as sectarian flags of identity, the march was a diverse mobilization that cut across class divides and brought together all those affected by Milei’s policies: pensioners, trans people, racialized people, women, students, state workers, Indigenous people, workers of the popular/informal economy, migrants, and those who have lost access to healthcare, to name a few, who were represented across the march’s different columns. The intersectional approach of the march was no surprise considering that in Argentina, poor and racialized trans and travesti activists have long been at the forefront of struggles for the recognition and widening of social rights.
What is at stake is more than just the present
1 February was a call to protect the freedoms and hard-won rights of women and LBTQI+ people, not just for the sake of those directly affected, but because those rights and freedoms define an idea of what Argentinian society is. Also, it was a call to oppose a programme that seeks to blame minorities for the ills of the economy to facilitate a brutal transfer of wealth towards corporations and the elites.
In the run-up to the march, a projection on the side of a building read: ‘from exclusion we knit resistance, from resistance we build a future.’ It remains to be seen whether this movement can articulate the much-needed alternatives to Milei’s ‘chainsaw’ programme that the opposition parties have not yet been able to put forward.
