“It hurts them that I am today one of the two most important politicians on planet Earth. One is Donald Trump and the other is me,” Javier Milei declared this week, in an essay responding to his detractors. The president of Argentina will take advantage of the opportunity, this Thursday and Friday, to once again show off his favorite role, that of global leader of the far right. He will do so within the framework of the third regional meeting of the Madrid Forum, which will take place in Buenos Aires and will have him in charge of the opening speech.
The Madrid Forum is an anti-communist coalition promoted for three years by the Spanish ultra-party Vox and brings together representatives of the Ibero-American right, neoliberals, fundamentalists, conservatives and authoritarians of diverse origins. There have already been meetings in Bogotá and Lima. With the declared objectives of “supporting the Venezuelan people” and “recovering the spaces of freedom taken away by the criminal left and the non-left in the Western world”, this time the conclave will take place in the Argentine capital, in the Palacio Libertad, the name with which the Milei Government renamed the Kirchner Cultural Center.
According to the organizers, the activities will bring together a thousand people and will take place in eight discussion panels. The topics of discussion planned explicitly configure the far-right agenda: the program includes “the importance of consolidating conservative networks between Europe, the United States and Latin America; the state of the cultural war against the left; and the commitment to Israel’s right to exist and defend itself.” Also included are issues such as “the instrumentalization of Justice by the left” and “the strategies that conservative forces should follow.” There will also be a panel dedicated to the situation in Venezuela.
Announced speakers include Chilean Republican Party leader José Antonio Kast; former Brazilian foreign minister during the Jair Bolsonaro administration Ernesto Araújo; Venezuelan writer Alejandro Peña Esclusa; Mark Klugmann, who worked alongside former US presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush; as well as legislators from Peru, Bolivia and Honduras, among others.
But the bulk of the speakers will be provided by Vox and the Milei Administration. The Argentine Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense, Diana Mondino and Luis Petri, will speak; the presidential spokesman, Manuel Adorni; the new Secretary of Religion, Nahuel Sotelo; and other officials. The MEPs Jorge Martín Frías and the deputy José María Figaredo will speak on behalf of the Spanish ultras; while —according to the released program— the welcoming and closing words will be given by the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal. At the end, a “Declaration of the Río de la Plata” will be read.
For Milei, the Madrid Forum meeting is a new move in his bid to establish himself as an international benchmark for the far right. This year he has already participated in two summits of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), in Washington and in the Brazilian city of Camboriú; and at the last minute he cancelled his trip to Mexico to attend a third. Last May he made a name for himself at a Vox conference in Madrid, in the midst of the campaign for the European elections, when he attacked the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez. In the almost ten months he has been president, Milei has also travelled to various European and North American locations to receive awards or give speeches in conservative or ultra-liberal institutions.
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