Buenos Aires, Argentina — Even before beginning a three-day visit to Madrid on Friday, Argentina’s libertarian president, Javier Milei, sparked controversy, accusing the socialist government of bringing “poverty and death” to Spain and weighing in on corruption allegations against the prime minister’s wife. Minister.
In such circumstances, a typical visiting head of state may endeavor to settle things with diplomacy.
Milei no. The brash economist has no plans to meet with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez during his three days in the Spanish capital, nor with the Spanish king or any other government official. Instead, he will attend a far-right summit on Sunday organized by Sánchez’s fiercest political opponent, the Vox party.
The unorthodox visit was a regular occurrence for Milei, a favorite of the global far-right who has rallied to tech billionaire Elon Musk and praised former US President Donald Trump. Earlier this year, on a trip to the United States, he stayed away from the White House and took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, where he railed against abortion and socialism and shared a bear hug with Trump.
Milei presented his 2022 book, “The Way of the Libertarian,” in Madrid on Friday at a literary event organized by La Razón, a conservative Spanish newspaper.
The book, withdrawn from circulation in Spain earlier this month because the biography on the back flap mistakenly said Milei had earned a doctorate, traces his meteoric rise in politics from an eccentric television personality to a national legislator and describes his radical free market economic ideas.
To thunderous applause, Milei condemned socialism as “an intellectual fraud and a horror in human terms.”
“The good thing is that the spotlight is on us everywhere and we are making the reds (leftists) uncomfortable all over the world,” Milei said.
He took the opportunity to promote the results of his harsh austerity campaign in Argentina, celebrating a decline in monthly inflation in April, although he made no mention of Buenos Aires metro fares that tripled overnight.
Repeating a campaign promise to eliminate Argentina’s central bank – without elaborating – Milei promised to make Argentina “the most economically free country in the world.”
At the event, Milei gave a big hug to his ideological ally Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right party Vox and the only politician with whom Milei has real plans to meet in Madrid.
Vox’s summit on Sunday seeks to bring together far-right figures from across Europe in a bid to rally the party’s base ahead of June’s European parliamentary elections. Milei described his attendance as a “moral imperative.” He also plans to meet with executives from Spanish companies on Saturday.
Tensions between Milei and Sánchez have simmered since the moment the Spanish prime minister refused to congratulate the libertarian economist on his surprise election victory last November.
But hostility exploded earlier this month when one of Sánchez’s ministers suggested Milei had used narcotics. The Argentine presidency responded with an unusually harsh official statement accusing the Sánchez government of “endangering the middle class with its socialist policies that bring nothing but poverty and death.”
The lengthy government statement also accused Sánchez of having “more important issues to address, such as the corruption allegations against his wife.”
Accusations of influence peddling and corruption brought by a right-wing group against Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, had led Sánchez, one of Europe’s longest-serving socialist leaders, to consider resigning.
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Associated Press writer Débora Rey contributed to this report.
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