“The sequence has gone so well that everything seems to have been agreed between the PSOE and Vox,” one of the PP’s electoral strategists for the European elections feels pained when reflecting on the diplomatic crisis with Argentina that has dominated the week, after the words of Javier Milei against Pedro Sánchez’s wife at a Vox rally in Madrid. “But it wouldn’t have worked out so well even with an agreement. It has given them both oxygen: the PSOE has surfed the Milei wave while there was almost no talk about the fact that they had overturned two laws in Parliament and that a court in Madrid was continuing the proceedings regarding Sánchez’s wife; and Vox has mobilized its own,” analyzes this member of the PP campaign control room. “On the other hand, we have shown our discomfort,” he admits.
The Milei crisis It has represented the umpteenth episode of lack of unity between the PP and the Government in a matter of State, foreign policy. Conditioned by the campaign, but not only, the popular have moved uncomfortably in the equidistance between Sánchez and the eccentric Argentine president, trapped in what they consider a fateful clamp of the PSOE and Vox.
Last Sunday was not a good day for the PP, with its main competitor on the right, Vox, gathering at the Vistalegre palace in Madrid more than 10,000 supporters and the best of the European, American and Latin American extreme right to three weeks of the European elections on June 9. To finish torpedoing the popular ones, the impact of the ultra event skyrocketed after the main star of the event, the Argentine Javier Milei, attacked President Pedro Sánchez and called his wife, Begoña Gómez, “corrupt.” . The Vox rally thus suddenly mutated into a diplomatic crisis that left the PP between two poles – that of Vox and Milei versus that of the Government of Spain – or what is the same in times of polarization: in no man’s land.
The first reaction of the PP was to sign up for one of the two sectors. The party’s statement, distributed the same Sunday afternoon, emphasized that its job “is to oppose the president of Spain, not the president of Argentina.” And shortly after, the parliamentary spokesperson, Miguel Tellado, took the blame for Sánchez—recalling that his minister Óscar Puente had been the first to offend Milei by suggesting that she takes drugs—without censoring the Argentine president’s attacks.
A day later, on Monday, the popular ones toured. “Milei’s speech is, of course, an interference in national politics and also a spectacle that I will describe as shocking,” admitted on Monday the institutional deputy secretary of the PP, Esteban González Pons. “The elected president of Argentina cannot, or should not, on his first visit to Spain come without greeting the King, the Government and Parliament, enter a political event of a party and stir up Spanish national politics,” he continued. he. “That said,” he added, “with all due respect, Pedro Sánchez’s wife is not a state matter and making her the reason for a possible break in diplomatic relations between Spain and Argentina is greatly exaggerating.”
The PP’s position evolved towards equidistance, with criticism of both parties. On Thursday, Alberto Núñez Feijóo temporized with the Argentine president: “What Mr. Milei has done is respond to the Government’s insults,” he said, before questioning why Spain ended up withdrawing the ambassador in Argentina. “We have questioned with enormous frivolity, for an absolutely inappropriate insult [de Milei] to the president’s wife, billions and billions of euros and a relationship of brotherhood with more than half a million Spaniards who live in Argentina, in addition to the Argentines who live here, because Mr. Milei has recalled a summary that the wife has of the president in a court in Plaza de Castilla; which seems absolutely inappropriate to me, but she did it at a rally.”
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Feijóo’s balance is explained by the attempt not to lose any segment of voters: neither those on the extreme right nor the centrists. The leader of the PP intends to reach all of them at the same time. “The PSOE knows very well that we are uncomfortable,” says one of the popular strategists. “If we criticize Milei, many of our people are surprised. They think: ‘but if she has told the truth, that Sánchez’s wife is corrupt, why do we give her?’ And if we do not criticize him, others question us for not protecting Spain. Whether we are hard or soft, we lose,” he laments.
The diplomatic crisis with Argentina is not the first case in which the PP moves away from a state position with the Government in foreign policy. The popular ones also do not support the imminent recognition of the State of Palestine that Sánchez promotes: they defend this recognition, but they believe that right now the conditions do not exist. And the lack of unity in international politics goes back a long way. According to the PP, the reason is that the Sánchez Government does not promote it. “Of course there is no unity. If there is no communication, if there is no dialogue or mutual trust, there is no possible unity,” says José Manuel García-Margallo, former popular Minister of Foreign Affairs.
The popular ones complain that the Government, for example, did not involve them in the turn over Western Sahara or the post-Brexit negotiations over Gibraltar, although Minister José Manuel Albares did call Tellado on Sunday to inform him of the crisis with Argentina. Margallo denies that the PP has “contemporized” with Milei, although he considers that, although the Argentine president’s words “are not admissible either in diplomatic terms or in domestic policy, because they were contrary to the presumption of innocence,” at the same time “ “All this has been caused by the Sánchez Government to search for an external enemy.”
Margallo considers “a nonsense” the withdrawal of the Spanish ambassador in Argentina due to the president’s insults to Sánchez’s wife. He recognizes that the PP took the same measure in 2016 with the ambassador to Venezuela, in response to President Nicolás Maduro’s insults against then-President Mariano Rajoy, whom he called “racist, corrupt and colonialist trash.” But he maintains: “It was different, because in Venezuela we had nothing to lose. In Argentina, on the other hand, we are the second largest investor after the United States. This puts our companies in a very complicated situation.”
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