Communication experts warn that the Adorni case is a strong blow to confidence in the government
They assess that the poor management of the chief of staff's crisis is potentially serious for the government's political management capacity and the economic plan.
By Diego Dillenberger
June 13, 2026, 05:11hs
Manuel Adorni in his Wednesday interview (Photo: TV Capture).
Always optimistic, Economy Minister Luis Caputo predicted that "in 2027, for the first time, the economy will sweep politics away." And he forecast that Javier Milei will win the next elections.
It's hard to argue with such an early electoral forecast, especially in Argentina, where anything is possible. But one thing is already certain: so far in 2026, politics is sweeping the economy away.
Arguments for "Toto" Caputo
- Risk rating agency Standard & Poor's finally improved Argentina's debt rating, and country risk showed signs of strongly breaking through the 500-point barrier it had resisted leaving.
- Inflation marked a decline for the second month after almost a year of constant rise.
- And, as if that were not enough, the Central Bank bought ten billion dollars in reserves: the entire year's goal in just five months.
There is only one argument against
Aside from the debate over whether the economic plan has inconsistencies or is a "paint job," the distrust generated by the government's political management has so far prevented the growth occurring in mining, energy, and agriculture from being felt in the rest of the economy: there are no major business landings, and since Milei took office, almost 25,000 companies have closed and 300,000 formal jobs have been lost. Only a portion of those unemployed found work in self-employment.
For this picture to change, beyond the problems with the design of the economic plan itself, Milei needs to generate much more credibility in his economic plan. Episodes like the saga of Chief of Staff Manuel Adorni are generating a lot of distrust.
What the polls say
A survey of a panel of 51 communication experts convened last Thursday by the magazine Imagen yields an alarming result: for 72 percent of these political consultants, pollsters, and business communicators, the interview Adorni gave on Thursday on TV, denying his own statements from a month ago during his interpellation in Congress and claiming that his suspected assets were now the result of having accumulated dollars under the table and an extraordinary profit from cryptocurrency betting, is "serious" and complicates the government's credibility (41 percent) or is directly "very serious" and could "sink the government, if it doesn't act quickly." Only 20 percent believe it is "negative, raises doubts, but everything passes."
The first polls of social media conversation are damning: more than 82 percent of mentions of Adorni are negative, according to the latest sample from the consultancy Reputación Digital, by Córdoba technology expert José Norte Sosa.
Even before the interview in which Adorni left Argentines stunned by denying himself and placing the President himself in a very complex situation of having to defend the indefensible, the University of San Andrés had published its June national survey showing that the slight recovery in approval of Milei's management—which various consultancies had shown in May—was fleeting: approval hit a new low of 35 percent, and disapproval returned to its high of 61 percent, according to the San Andrés team led by political scientist Diego Reynoso.
All these data send a signal to the economy
The 2027 presidential elections are approaching with increasing chances that Peronism will return and that Milei will not achieve re-election.
In doubt, politics is already sweeping the economy away from now:
- The announcements under the RIGI, SuperRIGI, or RIMI (medium investment regime) already total more than 120 billion dollars, but so far not even 1 percent of those promises have arrived, and from here to 2027, with a lot of luck, another 1 percent will come.
- Argentines—in general—continue to distrust the peso, because their dollar purchases keep growing and have reached a rate of 2 billion per month: more than the dollars the Central Bank manages to hoard, showing that the public with savings capacity does not trust the peso even with the very high interest rates offered by the market and prefers to bet on the greenback.
- Another six million Argentines simply cannot bet on the dollar because they have already defaulted on their credit cards, banks, or virtual wallet lenders: neither the indebted nor the dollar buyers consume.
- Although official inflation is finally falling, the trust survey on INDEC's price index data prepared by the consultancy Zentrix shows that since January—just when the government decided not to update the index to a more realistic one to measure how Argentines spend their incomes today compared to the old 2004 CPI basket—distrust jumped from 56 percent to 70 percent, while credibility in official inflation data collapsed from 41 to just 27 percent.
All these "attitudes" from the public and companies are screaming: we do not trust the Argentine economy, even if risk rating agencies Fitch or Standard & Poor's have better rated Argentine debt.
The government wants to make it too easy for itself
If people and investors distrust, it is the fault of journalism, which does not highlight the virtues of the economic plan and hides them, as Milei and Caputo agreed two weeks ago. The President said that "there has never been in Argentina such a large spread between what happens in the economy and what the media report." Spread simply means "gap" or "margin."
But the "spread" of the inflation index that Argentines perceive daily in their pockets and that, incomprehensibly, Milei decided at the last moment in January not to update is also very significant: every month since January, it gives at least half a percentage point higher than the official one: because what rises the most are services, and the old CPI has a much lighter service component, since it comes from Kirchnerism which subsidized them to win votes, the strong increases in public services that overwhelm Argentines are not reflected in the official numbers. Over a year, the difference can reach almost 10 percentage points.
That spread itself is not minor, but it generates an immense gap in the credibility of the official inflation published by the government: from the 15 points in January between those who trust and those who distrust the accuracy of the inflation measured by INDEC, in May that difference had tripled to 42 percentage points.
Read also: Just when Milei's image was ceasing to fall, another self-inflicted crisis puts his recovery at risk
Paraphrasing the saying about seeing the speck in another's eye but not the log in one's own: the spread generated by the distortion of inflation measurement in public trust is greater than the "speck" of journalism that "hides what happens in the economy," according to Milei.
Crises like that of a chief of staff who denies himself about how he obtained his assets already suspected by justice and sows doubts about the degree of honesty of the entire government, added to suspicions that the inflation numbers published by the government are not entirely reliable, do not allow such optimistic forecasts that in 2027 "the economy will sweep politics away," as Minister Caputo predicted.
