Karina: The sister. The Boss. The sovereign.
Victoria De Masi

NONFICTION | 2024 | 224 pages

The life of the unknown woman who built the most unexpected president in the span of a few months.

At just eight years old, Karina Elizabeth Milei sat in the stands of the Lugano soccer field to watch her brother make saves. Her perfect attendance record turned her into the team’s mascot. Many years later, without political training or any experience whatsoever in electoral contests, that same young girl constructed two campaigns. In 2021, she placed her brother at the center of the scene and took him to the National Congress. In 2023, to the Casa Rosada presidential offices. As the president’s Secretary General, she is the leader of La Libertad Avanza, a phenomenon with great global impact that caused profound changes in ways of life after the pandemic. She decoded the demand for a new way of doing politics: from entrepreneurship to social media hate, from intimate connection with animals to post-truth, from the fall of institutional discourse to the fall of the family as socitety’s organizational nucleus. Karina, also a victim of an abusive father, became the president’s protector, support system, and inseparable counterpart. Lacking the gift of loquacity, she avoids contact with the press. The enigma multiplies the questions that surround her: does she make state decisions by reading tarot cards? Is she shrewd or is she merely a lucky woman? What are the values that guide her? How ruthless is she?

In this surprising investigation, Victoria De Masi—who has covered the Milei family’s vertiginous rise—pierces the secret that surrounds the siblings and describes the discipline and silence with which they build their power like no one has done before. Karina, the Boss, doesn’t speak: she executes.

RIGHTS: spanish PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE