In a rousing speech to the World Economic Forum on Thursday, Argentina President Javier Milei attacked the “cancer” of wokeism and declared that a global hegemony of left-wing ideology and politics is starting to “crumble.” 

“What once seemed like a global hegemony of the ‘woke’ left in politics, educational institutions, in the media, in supranational organizations or even in forums like Davos, has begun to crumble,” Mr. Milei told business and political leaders in Davos, Switzerland.

The libertarian leader, who has modeled himself after President Trump, said he has been striking up alliances with world leaders who have moved past left-wing ideology.

“Over the course of this year, I have found allies in this fight for the cause of freedom in every corner of the world, from the amazing [tech billionaire] Elon Musk to that fierce Italian lady [Prime Minister] Giorgia Meloni, from [President Nayib] Bukele in El Salvador to Viktor Orban in Hungary,” he said, also naming Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and Mr. Trump as allies. Mr. Trump is scheduled to address the Davos gathering virtually later on Thursday.

“Slowly, an international alliance has been forming among all those nations who want to be free and believe in the ideas of liberty,” Milei said.

In his second address to the Forum since taking office in 2023, Mr. Milei said, “The mental virus of woke ideology [is] an epidemic that is destroying the foundations of Western civilization. Woke is the cancer that needs to be extirpated. It has colonized our institutions, our universities, our media and even our supranational bodies,” he said. 

“It is the result of cultural subversion,” he said, adding that “wokeism” is designed for “criticism and dissent. … Social justice is nothing more than the disguise of socialism. And socialism, in all its forms, always ends in misery,” he said.

Mr. Milei said he had come to Davos to warn that “the battle is not yet won. … Although hope has been rekindled, it is our moral duty and responsibility to dismantle the ideological edifice of sickly wokeism,” he said.

“Feminism, equality, gender ideology, climate change, abortion and immigration, are all heads of the same monster, whose aim is to justify the advance of the state,” he added. “This is the great epidemic in our time that must be cured,” said the La Libertad Avanza leader.

Picking up a term Mr. Trump used in his second inaugural address, Mr. Milei warned that an international “golden age” of freedom cannot come if “this aberrant ideology” remains in force. “Otherwise, the fate of the West will be the same as that of all civilizations that have allowed themselves to be overrun by the destructive ideologies of the past,” he said.

Mr. Milei made waves last year with his address to the Forum, in which he said the “Western world is in danger,” adding “those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty.”

He opened his speech on Thursday noting, “A year ago I stood here in front of you alone and spoke some truths about the state of the Western world that were received with some surprise and astonishment.

“I no longer feel so alone,” he said.