Spain permanently recalls ambassador from Argentina
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Spain has said it is permanently withdrawing its ambassador from Argentina as a result of a growing diplomatic feud with the South American country’s radical rightwing president, Javier Milei.
Milei – a notoriously pugnacious ally of the fellow populists Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro – sparked the row last weekend by insinuating that Begoña Gómez, the wife of Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, was “corrupt”.
The remarks to a summit of the global far right outraged Spain’s centre-left government, which denounced Milei’s “frontal attack” on its democracy and demanded a full public apology. But Milei doubled down on Monday, declaring that he had no intention of retracting them and was himself “the victim”.
Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, responded on Tuesday by announcing that his top envoy to Buenos Aires, María Jesús Alonso Jiménez, would not be returning to her post, having been recalled the previous day. “The ambassador will remain permanently in Madrid, Argentina will be left without an ambassador,” Albares said, according to the Spanish newspaper El País.
Milei quickly hit back, calling the move the “baloney” of an “arrogant socialist” but said he would not be “stupid enough to repeat the same mistake” by withdrawing Argentina’s ambassador to Spain.
Spain’s opposition, the conservative People’s party (PP), accused Sánchez of overreacting, hypocrisy, using the row to political ends ahead of June’s European elections, and of making life harder for Spanish companies that supply the Argentinian market. “A country’s foreign policy can’t be set according the whims of one person,” said a PP source.
“The same government that didn’t pull out its ambassador in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and after Vladimir Putin decided to start a war that has already lasted more than two years is doing so now with its ambassador in Argentina because Pedro Sánchez feels insulted by the word Javier Milei used at a rally,” the source added.
The spat is part of an intensifying global skirmish between progressive political forces and a coalition of hard-right populists of which Milei is one of the leading lights alongside the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele.
