Protests against President Javier Milei’s cuts to Argentina’s cherished public university system filled the streets of Buenos Aires and other cities on Tuesday, as students, professors, and families demanded the government respect a congressional law mandating funding for higher education.
The Associated Press reported that vast crowds marched toward the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, chanting slogans and carrying signs that targeted Milei’s austerity program as well as a growing corruption scandal. One student placard read, “How much does Adorni cost us?” — a reference to Cabinet chief Manuel Adorni, who is under investigation for lavish spending that appears at odds with his modest official salary and declared assets.
Congress passed legislation last year requiring the government to fund university operating costs and raise teacher salaries in line with Argentina’s persistently high inflation. Milei’s administration, however, has refused to implement the law, arguing in court that it fails to specify how the state will pay for the mandated increases amid steep fiscal austerity. The case is expected to reach the Supreme Court.
University leaders say the consequences are already severe. Ricardo Gelpi, rector of the prestigious University of Buenos Aires, told the AP that the erosion of professors’ purchasing power — down roughly 33% after inflation — has forced at least 580 research professors in engineering and the sciences to abandon the public system for private universities or more competitive pay overseas. The main teachers’ federation confirmed the wage decline.
Milei, a libertarian who models himself after former U.S. President Donald Trump, has repeatedly derided university campuses as centers of “woke” indoctrination and made deep cuts to public education a centerpiece of his “chain saw” approach to state spending. His undersecretary for university policies, Alejandro Álvarez, dismissed Tuesday’s march as “completely political” and said the government had offered modest increases for operating costs — bargaining that unions have rejected as inadequate.
For many Argentines, the tuition-free university system, established in 1949 and credited with producing five Nobel laureates, is a near-universal source of national pride and a key ladder into the country’s large middle class. “University is a source of pride for us. It is the best thing we have,” Sol Muñíz, a 24-year-old law student at the University of Buenos Aires, told the AP from the march.
The protests Tuesday came as Milei’s approval ratings sag under the weight of economic contraction, falling wages, rising unemployment, and a series of corruption scandals. The investigation into Adorni’s spending, in particular, has amplified public anger over a government that promised to clean up the “political caste” but whose top officials now face their own ethics questions.
The government’s legal challenge to the university funding law is expected to be heard by Argentina’s highest court. Protesters on Tuesday called on the Supreme Court to “listen to the outcry throughout the country’s public squares.”