Chronology of the diplomatic crisis with Milei’s Argentina

The Government’s decision – communicated by its Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, at the end of the Council of Ministers – to withdraw the Spanish ambassador to Argentina, María Jesús Alonso, marks a milestone in relations between both countries due to the tear it represents. between two nations linked by common history and because never before and with no one had the Executive adopted such a drastic measure. That the cabinets of Pedro Sánchez and Javier Milei were going to have difficulties maintaining a minimum of complicity was evident in light of the ideological and political programs of both leaders.

But nothing indicated that the blood was going to reach the river of a rupture that compromises relations until now of brotherhood in which economic interests weigh heavily – Spain is risking 18,000 million in the South American State in this crisis – and that bursts with a bang in the European campaign that begins in the early hours of this Friday. A strained campaign, in line with the offensive expressions expressed by Milei at the annual Vox convention, by the socialists, on the one hand, and the radical right, on the other, with the PP trying to escape the pressure of both.

These are the milestones of an unprecedented confrontation that begins to wash away with the arrival of the Argentine leader to power and has exploded at the gates of 9-J with Spanish politics convulsed, among other things, by the judicial case opened by the professional activities of Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez.

The emergence on the international scene of the leader of the Libertarian Party, armed with his bizarre chainsaw, the slogan of ‘Long live freedom, damn it!’ and an ultraliberal ideology, was responded by Sánchez with express support for his opponent in the second round of the Argentine elections, the Peronist Sergio Massa. The president and general secretary of the PSOE himself had recorded a video ahead of the elections in which he appealed for the victory of Massa, a candidate for “tolerance and dialogue” in his country “in the face of the stridency” of Javier Milei. Sánchez did not, in fact, congratulate Milei on his victory at the polls and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs limited itself to sending a statement congratulating the Argentine citizens on the electoral process.

The consequence of the icy reception for the new South American president was that neither the Spanish president nor Minister Albares, who the next day closed his last council in Brussels under the rotating presidency of the EU, attended the inauguration of the new tenant of the Palace. de la Moneda on December 10 in Buenos Aires. Both delegated to a second-level position – Juan Fernández Trigo, Secretary of State for Latin America and the Caribbean and Spanish in the world – the accompaniment of King Felipe VI, who was present and met with both Milei and the predecessor of he, Alberto Fernández.

The leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, boasted of his complicity with the newly elected president at the head of a prominent representation of Vox and together with other international faces of the extreme right such as the Hungarian Viktor Orban and the Brazilian Jair Bolsonaro. The PP sent to the Buenos Aires capital the former president of the Community of Madrid Esperanza Aguirre and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, rescued for a party spokesperson and who was photographed with the leaders of the traditional right, the former president Mauricio Macri and Patricia Bullrich, current Minister of National Security in Milei’s cabinet. A Milei that former president Mariano Rajoy and eight other former international leaders had endorsed before the elections.

The first diplomatic conflict already reached such a dimension that it gave the measure of where the dialogue was heading between Sánchez who has made the “wall” against the right and the extreme right the motto of his mandate and the bizarre ultra-liberalism of Milei. It was the Spanish Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, who opened the spigot by scathingly attributing the way in which the Latin American leader behaves and speaks to the ingestion of “substances” in a colloquium of his party on communication and social networks. Puente would later say he regretted having expressed himself in those terms if he had been aware of the “spread” they were going to achieve, but without apologizing.

The Milei Executive took just a few hours to address Puente’s grievance and did so by moving forward. The official note launched from La Moneda ignored the minister to directly attack Sánchez. It was the first time that the Argentine authorities alluded to the fact that the Spanish president, who was coming out of the five-day retreat after which he chose to continue in power to combat “the mud machine”, had “more important problems to deal with, like the accusations of corruption that fall on his wife.

Not only: the statement urged that justice “quickly clarify such a scandal” that supposedly threatened “the stability” of Spain and, “consequently, relations with our country.” At the same time, Milei’s cabinet accused Sánchez of “endangering” the unity of the State with his pacts with the independentists, women by allowing illegal immigration and the middle class “with his socialist policies that only bring poverty and death.” ». The Ministry of Foreign Affairs countered this note with another in which it underlined the bond of brotherhood between both countries. Argentina ended up settling the dispute.

Javier Milei’s first visit to Spain fuels the exceptional nature of the moment: without an official meeting with either the head of state – the King – or with President Sánchez, the Argentine president travels to participate in the annual Voice convention, which has become the launch of the campaign for 9-J with the intervention of the leadership of the international radical right. Milei only meets with the president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, and, in a controversial public photograph, with a reference group of directors of large Spanish companies with interests in their country.

But it is in the macro event on Sunday in Vistalegre when the Latin American president, in the course of a speech of more than half an hour that outlines his ultraliberal thoughts, once again equates socialism with death and points directly at Sánchez, who has provided protocol and security for the visit. Milei calls the Moncloa tenant “a type of people screwed to power” and calls his wife “corrupt”, without mentioning her name.

Milei’s words, on the eve of an electoral campaign proposed by the PSOE as a containment dam against the extreme right and the “coward” in Spain and in Europe, lead Moncloa to call on the same Sunday afternoon an official appearance without questions from the External subjects minister. Albares announces the call for consultations, with no day of return, to the ambassador in Buenos Aires, María Jesús Alonso, and threatens to break relations if the Argentine leader does not back down and apologize.

The Argentine Government made it clear after the reaction of the Spanish Executive that it considered a diplomatic initiative of such significance as the call for consultations from the head of the legation in Buenos Aires to be excessive and that Milei had no intention of rectifying. Once back in his country, the president himself stressed in an interview that he is the one to whom the apology is due because he is “the one attacked”, he once again assumed that Begoña Gómez is “corrupt” despite not being charged and He accused Sánchez of colluding with Peronism to try to overthrow him.

What had never happened ends up happening. Spain permanently withdraws its ambassador, a step that Spanish diplomacy had not carried out until now with any other country and amid criticism from the opposition, but also from some of its partners. For Milei, the gesture constitutes “nonsense.”