In Rabbi Shimon Axel Wahnish, Argentinean president Javier Milei found a mentor — and the perfect ambassador to Israel
Sometime in late April 2023, with the Argentine autumn under way, a non-Jewish economist-turned-politician with a wild hairdo picked up the phone to a local rabbi to share an outlandish plan. Then-congressman Javier Milei, a libertarian economist who’d spent years railing against his country’s establishment, told his mentor Rabbi Shimon Axel Wahnish that he was planning on running for the presidency of Argentina.
The notion of the former economist ascending to the Casa Rosada was so absurd that the rabbi jokingly upped the ante: “If you become president, I’ll be your ambassador to Israel,” he quipped.
But to Milei — deadly serious about upending Argentina’s political order — the idea was no joke. “Who better than my rabbi to represent my government to Israel?” he replied.
Against all the odds, both sides of the improbable pact came to pass. On November 19, 2023, Hurricane Milei made landfall over Buenos Aires. The much-mocked outsider clinched the presidential race in a runoff, taking over 56 percent of the votes to become the world’s first libertarian president.
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