Argentine President Javier Milei said Tuesday that Spain’s decision to pull its ambassador from Buenos Aires amid a diplomatic spat was “absurd,” and he would not play tit for tat.
“It is absurd, typical of an arrogant socialist,” said Milei, who angered Madrid after he called Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s wife “corrupt” during a far-right conference at the weekend.
Asked by the LN+ channel about whether Argentina would in turn withdraw its ambassador from Spain, Milei said: “No, not at all.”
“This stains the international image of Spain and (shows) how arrogant they are, like believing that they are the State and that no one can tell them anything,” said Milei.
Referring to his comments, Milei said the fact that Sanchez felt targeted was “his problem, it was a sentence that did not contain names, and from there he made a senseless diplomatic escalation.”
“If he feels targeted it is because he is dirty, it is not my fault,” he added.
Sanchez, a Socialist, recently considered resigning after Spanish prosecutors opened a preliminary corruption investigation against his wife, Begona Gomez, which was quickly closed.
Milei did not mention her by name in his comments attacking socialism.
“They don’t know the type of society and country that can produce, the type of people clinging to power and the level of abuse that generates.”
He added: “When you have a corrupt wife, let’s say, it gets dirty, and you take five days to think about it.”
In his comments Tuesday, Milei said “Pedro Sanchez has an inferiority complex” and recommended “a psychologist for him to mature and a good lawyer for Begona because she already has a lot of cases where she is suspected of influence peddling.”
Milei has previously refused to apologize, complaining he himself had been attacked because Spanish government officials called him “xenophobic, racist, far-right … science denier, misogynist.”
