Spain and Argentina have resumed dialogue despite the diplomatic crisis that erupted after President Javier Milei attacked the wife of the head of government, Pedro Sánchez, in Madrid. The Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, held his first telephone conversation last week with his Argentine counterpart, Diana Mondino, since Spain withdrew its ambassador in Buenos Aires. Both ministers will meet at the end of September at a breakfast of Ibero-American foreign ministers on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York, although it is not yet known whether they will take advantage of the opportunity to have a bilateral meeting.
Sources familiar with the conversation indicated that it was held at the initiative of the Argentine foreign minister and took place in a “cordial tone” and during the course of the conversation both ministers discussed the Middle East conflict, among other issues. The dialogue took place in a context of coincidences between both diplomacies in different multilateral forums: Spain and Argentina signed the declaration released last Friday in Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), in which twenty countries urged the Maduro regime to cease repression and release the minutes of the recent Venezuelan elections; and all the Ibero-American foreign ministers, including Argentina, approved that the XXX summit of said community, in 2026, be held in Spain.
There is still a long way to go before relations are fully normalised, which will only happen when Spain appoints a new ambassador to Argentina, following the recall of diplomat María Jesús Alonso Jiménez last May, which a few days later turned into a definitive withdrawal. The trigger for the crisis was Milei’s words at the pre-election rally held by Vox in Madrid’s Plaza de Vistalegre, where she said that Pedro Sánchez had a “corrupt wife”. In the following days, the escalation of insults continued, calling the head of the Spanish Government a “coward”, and justifying himself by claiming that the Spanish Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, had previously attacked him by suggesting, in a talk with young people, that he took drugs.
The withdrawal of the ambassador is one of the harshest diplomatic protest measures. However, the Argentine foreign minister downplayed it and described the crisis with Spain as an “anecdote”, an “internal and political” matter that did not affect relations between the two societies, as she said at an event with businessmen in Buenos Aires. Milei returned to Madrid in June, where he was awarded by the regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and again attacked Sánchez.
One of the obstacles to full normalisation is the unpredictable character of the Argentine president. His latest outburst was on the 6th when, following graffiti painted by an environmental group on the home of footballer Lionel Messi in Ibiza, he wrote on the social network X: “In Spain, the communists who want to ‘kill the rich and abolish the police to end climate change’ vandalised a house of Lionel Messi and his family. I stand in solidarity with the Messi family for this cowardly and delusional event and I ask the government of Pedro Sánchez to guarantee the safety of Argentine citizens living in the Kingdom of Spain.”
The cold relations between the two governments led Milei and Sánchez to avoid each other at the international forum on peace in Ukraine held on July 16 in Switzerland. It will be more difficult for them to do so at the two summits they will attend next November: the G-20 summit in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and the Ibero-American Community summit in Cuenca (Ecuador).
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Both governments have reasons to try to prevent their political and ideological differences from affecting bilateral relations: Spain is the second largest foreign investor in Argentina (with a stock accumulated 18 billion euros) and the Spanish colony in that country is the largest in the world (482,176 citizens).
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