Argentine President Javier Milei gestures as he introduces his book “El camino del libertario” in Madrid, Spain, on Friday.
Manu Fernandez/AP
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Manu Fernandez/AP
Argentine President Javier Milei gestures as he introduces his book “El camino del libertario” in Madrid, Spain, on Friday.
Manu Fernandez/AP
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Even before embarking on a three-day visit to Madrid on Friday, Argentina’s liberal President Javier Milei stirred controversy, accusing the socialist government of bringing “ poverty and death” for Spain and weighs allegations of corruption against the prime minister’s government. wife.
In such circumstances, a typical visiting head of state might try to mend fences through diplomacy.
Not Milei. The brash economist has no plans to meet Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez during his three days in the Spanish capital – nor the Spanish king or any other government officials. Instead, he will attend a far-right summit on Sunday organized by Sánchez’s fiercest political rival, the Vox party.
The unorthodox visit was business as usual for Milei, a darling of the global far right who has a close relationship with tech billionaire Elon Musk and praises former US President Donald Trump. Earlier this year during a trip to the United States, Milei left the White House and took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, where he condemned abortion and socialism, while embracing Trump.
Milei introduced her 2022 book, “The Libertarian Way,” in Madrid on Friday at a literary event organized by La Razón, a conservative Spanish newspaper.
The book — which was withdrawn from circulation in Spain earlier this month because a back-page biography incorrectly said Milei had earned a doctorate — traces his rapid rise in politics, from a Eccentric television personality became a national legislator and outlined his radical free-market economic ideas.
To thunderous applause, Milei denounced socialism as “an intellectual fraud and a human horror.”
“The good thing is that the spotlight is shining on us everywhere and we are making the (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 drop in monthly inflation in April, although there was no mention of metro fares in Buenos Aires. Aires has more than tripled overnight.
Repeating his campaign pledge to eliminate Argentina’s central bank – without giving further details – Milei promised to make Argentina “the most economically free country in the world”.
At the event, Milei hugged his ideological ally Santiago Abascal, leader of the far-right Vox party and the only politician Milei planned to meet in Madrid.
The Vox summit on Sunday seeks to bring together far-right figures from across Europe in an effort to rally the party’s base ahead of European parliamentary elections in June. Milei describes his attendance It is a “moral imperative.” He also plans to meet with Spanish business executives on Saturday.
Tensions between Milei and Sánchez have been simmering since the moment the Spanish prime minister refused to congratulate the liberal economist on his shock election victory last November.
But hostilities exploded earlier this month when one of Sánchez’s ministers suggested that Milei had used drugs. Argentina’s president responded with an unusually harsh official statement accusing Sánchez’s government of “endangering the middle class with socialist policies that bring nothing but poverty and death.”
The government’s lengthy statement also accused Sánchez of having “more important matters to deal with, such as corruption charges against his wife”.
Allegations of influence peddling and corruption brought by a right-wing group against Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, have left Sánchez, one of the longest-serving Socialist Party leaders in Europe, consider resigning.
