Spain has “permanently” withdrawn its ambassador to Argentina. The announcement by the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, May 21, noted the serious chill in diplomatic relations between Spain and its former colony. The atmosphere was already hardly warm at the end of a visit by Javier Milei to Spain where he did not even take the time to meet the Spanish Prime Minister and after the Argentine President treated the wife of Pedro Sánchez of “corrupt”. This is the subject of a preliminary investigation which the Spanish justice system requested to be dismissed in April.
Argentina, led since December 2023 by the exuberant and outrageous populist Javier Milei, continues to make enemies abroad. And this while this country in crisis faces a cruel need for investment. The improvement in certain economic indicators – the slowdown of inflation among the highest on the planet, the increase in foreign exchange reserves – in recent months masks a serious recession. The shock of austerity desired by the new executive has caused poverty to explode.
Heir to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro – even more uninhibited and crude – the libertarian Javier Milei relentlessly criticizes socialism, which he compares to “waste, human excrement”. Forgetting that many Latin American countries are led by left-wing figures, Javier Milei has alienated several heads of state in the region.
Isolated in Latin America
He thus described the Brazilian Lula as a “furious communist”, called the Colombian Gustavo Petro a “terrorist assassin” – in reference to the president’s guerrilla past -, insulted the Mexican Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador who according to him was an “ignorant”. The latter is not to be outdone, having called his Argentinian counterpart “facho conservative”. For the researcher specializing in international relations at Conicet (Argentinian equivalent of the CNRS) Bernabé Malacalza, “Milei has launched a crusade against anyone who does not share his vision of the world.” This posture “isolates him in Latin America, and leaves the leaders of the region stunned, as Milei breaks diplomatic codes,” he continues.
But the Argentine president is not limited to Latin American leaders in his diatribes. Javier Milei also regularly targets China, a country which ranked second – behind the “corrupt” Lula’s Brazil – in Argentina’s imports last year. In August 2023, then a candidate, Milei declared at Bloomberg : “People are not free in China, they cannot do what they want, and when they do, they are killed. Would you have business dealings with an assassin?”
What does he have to gain from these diplomatic quarrels? Does he even have any allies left? “Milei is a narcissist, he wants to be the leader of the new international right, to be its new point of reference,” believes Bernabé Malacalza. The Argentine president, who claims to be anti-system, does not care about upsetting leaders around the world. “Heads of state matter little to him, he is more interested in the world of finance and big technologies,” continues the political scientist. As evidenced by his meeting with Elon Musk in one of the billionaire’s gigafactories in Texas in April. Like its predecessors, Milei is betting big on the lithium contained in large quantities in the soils of northwest Argentina.
Strongly pro-Israel
The eccentric president is a fervent supporter of Donald Trump, alongside whom he appeared in February in the United States on the sidelines of a conservative conference. On the video of their meeting, even the former American president seems uncomfortable with the exaltation of his disheveled interlocutor. “But Milei also maintains good relations with American Democrats since in his reading of the world, the United States is in any case on the ‘good side’ of the Cold War, against the Chinese, who according to him embody evil”, points out Bernabé Malacalza.
The Argentine president, who has said he is considering converting to Judaism, is also firmly pro-Israel. In February, he made his first presidential trip abroad, during which he announced the move of the Argentine embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Milei is today one of the few leaders in the world who has not expressed any criticism of the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip. “Israel is not committing a single excess” in this war, he argued in March.
Milei also appears alongside representatives of the European extreme right. His Spanish trip, in mid-May, was not only devoted to insulting the wife of Pedro Sánchez: the Argentine president was one of the guests of honor at the congress of the Spanish far-right party Vox, the great rally of the European ultra-right in which Marine Le Pen also took part.
Questioned by the French media about Milei, the former president of the National Rally, for her part, insisted on distancing herself from the Argentine populist, claiming to have positions that were “radically different” from hers. A cautious posture which contrasts with the enthusiastic welcome reserved for the “loco” (crazy, in Spanish, one of his nicknames) in Madrid, where thousands of far-right supporters took up his slogan in unison: “Long live the freedom, damn it!”
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