President Javier Milei vHe will return to Madrid this Friday to be decorated twice. He will receive the International Medal of the Community of Madrid, which will be awarded to him by the regional president Isabel Díaz Ayuso. And he will participate in a ceremony, the Freedom Dinner, where he will be awarded the prize that the Juan de Mariana Institute gives to those who “defend the ideas of freedom.”
In a gesture to distance itself from the diplomatic tension that erupted last month between Milei and the head of the Spanish government, Pedro Sánchez – when Spain withdrew its ambassador in Buenos Aires because the Argentine president refused to apologize for having called “corrupt” his wife-, Díaz Ayuso chooses to decorate Javier Milei with a distinction that only she can grant, by decree, “as courtesy and recognition.”
The president of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, and that of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, are some of the politicians who received it.
The event will be at the Real Casa de Correos, the building with a clock tower that occupies a block, in the heart of Puerta del Sol, and which today is the headquarters of the regional government of Madrid.
It is scheduled to be at seven in the afternoon, an hour and a half before Milei attends the event that will have him as a guest of honor, just 350 meters from the Royal Post Office where he will leave with his medal.
It will be a dinner that will be familiar to Javier Milei. He himself attended last year’s, along with his sister, the current secretary general of the presidency, Karina Milei.
Dedicated to the dissemination of liberal thought, the Juan de Mariana organizes, every June, a freedom week, with seminars, round tables and a book fair that culminates with dinner and the prize that, this time, will include the drawing of 56 copies of The Way of the Libertarian, the book Milei wrote two years ago.
For the draw it is essential to register online on the institute’s website. There is time until midnight on Friday and the first ten copies drawn will be autographed by the author.
On Friday, June 21, the 365 people who got their ticket to see Milei will be waiting for him in the main hall of the Real Casino of Madrid, one of the architectural jewels of the early 20th century, on Alcalá Street.
They paid 150 euros to see and hear the Argentine president, “the first libertarian in the world,” as the leader of La Libertad Avanza likes to admit to himself.
Getting a place at one of the round tables with white tablecloths that usually populate the freedom dinners was an odyssey.
For the first time, the possibility of purchasing tickets was restricted only to members of the institute that awards Milei. Membership, which includes benefits and discounts on paid activities organized by Juan de Mariana, is 60 euros per year for those under 26 years of age, and 150 for others.
About 200 tickets went on sale online on May 24 and high demand blocked the website.
It was then decided to enable an attached room, with a screen and a promise: that Javier Milei, at some point during the evening, will stop by to greet diners who are not located in the main room.
Other winners
Milei will receive this year the award that two of its ideological leaders have already obtained: the Spanish professor Jesús Huerta de Sotoin 2016, and the current deputy of La Libertad Avanza, Alberto Benegas Lynch -son-, in 2017. He was also awarded, in 2012, the Nobel Prize in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa.
The distinction that Javier Milei will receive is named after the Jesuit theologian of the Spanish Golden Age who best represented liberal ideas in the 16th century.
“His denunciation of monetary adulteration, monopolies, non-consensual taxes and unjust war give us the stature of the application of liberal principles to the study of attacks against freedom,” the institute defines it. your name.
Make history
“From our point of view, Javier has made history,” Manuel Llamas, director of the Juan de Mariana Institute, told Clarín.
Llamas, who was also Vice Minister of Economy of the Community of Madrid governed by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, stressed: “Milei has achieved what had never been achieved before: to successfully and effectively disseminate and communicate the ideas of freedom so that many Argentines “decide to bet on a change of course in order to recover the wealth and well-being that they had and that unfortunately they lost as a consequence of socialism and the success of Peronism.”
Last year, when he attended the Freedom Dinner, Javier Milei was a deputy with aspirations for the presidency whom the winner of the 2023 Juan de Mariana Prize, the Galician economist and professor Miguel Anxo Bastos, looked at in amazement.
During his speech, Bastos confessed: “I don’t believe that something similar can be done in Argentina.”
“We liberals really like Jeremías. Our Lord God sent the prophet Jeremiah to preach. And he told him: ‘But you know one thing, they are not going to pay any attention to you.’ When I started we were few. This was growing,” said the professor of Public Policies and Contemporary Social Movements at the University of Santiago de Compostela.
Pedro Sánchez “pretends” to be unaware of Milei’s trip
Milei’s fleeting passage through Madrid, of which Pedro Sánchez’s government “pretends” to be unaware – although it authorized his plane to land at the Torrejón de Ardoz air base, that his escorts carry weapons and that the Ministry of the Interior provide security -, will have his moment of glory on Friday at 8:30 p.m., when he climbs the main staircase of the Real Casino, the best modernist style that remains in Madrid.
The Argentine president will sleep in the Spanish capital and, the next day, he will leave for Germany and then the Czech Republic. Meetings with the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and possible meetings with the Czech President, Petr Pavel, and with the Prime Minister, Petr Fiala, await him. He will receive more awards and praise, a balm before returning to his homeland.
