A team including several current and former right-wing MPs from Germany and Austria has founded a new think-tank that aims to push deregulation to the top of the agenda in Germany and the European Union.
The Javier Milei Institute for Deregulation in Europe (JMI) was officially founded on December 4 as first reported by news site Apollo today.
It was named after Argentinean President Javier Milei whose radical libertarian politics have endeared him to many on the European Right. Milei reportedly gave his blessing for the think-tank to use his name.
The team behind it comprises several leading libertarian politicians from Germany – including Frauke Petry and Joana Cotar, both former MPs for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, as well as Barbara Kolm, an MP for the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ).
Petry left AfD in 2017, complaining the party was moving towards extremism, and Cotar left in 2022, saying AfD was getting too close to Russia.
Today Petry told German magazine Cicero, the new think-tank aims to accumulate know-how to develop concrete deregulation measures for Germany and Europe:
“We are suffocating under bureaucracy because the state is regulating far too much. This is why we will come up with a catalogue of measures which contains all methods and tools for comprehensive deregulation in Germany,” she said.
Petry added that the institute’s role-model is Argentinean economist Federico Sturzenegger who elaborated a similar catalogue of measures for President Milei.
In its endeavours the new think-tank will co-operate with libertarian organisations including Friedrich von Hayek Society in Germany and Ludwig von Mises Institute in the US.
Petry added that Germany was in dire need of radical overhaul: “The last economic reforms were undertaken by chancellor Gerhard Schröder [Social Democratic Party, SPD] with his Agenda 2010.
“Everybody agrees nowadays that the country and the subsequent government of chancellor Angela Merkel greatly profited from his decisions – which were very unpopular in the SPD back then,” she said.
“Today the necessary therapy is much more drastic than back then. And there is nobody anywhere to be seen in Berlin who is ready to attack the problem at its root.”
Petry commended Milei for cutting back the “intermediate levels” of the State: “He abolished a lot of the administration and succeeded in getting more financial means to those who really need it.”
Petry and Cotar – who both left the AfD in 2017 and 2022, respectively – have also co-founded the small German libertarian party Team Freiheit in 2025. Petry, though, said she wants her new project to follow “a broad cross-party approach”.
The JMI’s first project is a conference in Germany in early 2026 to bring together “advocates of freedom in society and the economy”.
