Spain’s government has accused Argentine President Javier Milei of disgraceful election interference after a Madrid visit in which he called Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez a dictator and urged Spanish voters to remove his socialist government. Speaking at an economic forum in the capital on Wednesday, Milei said Spain suffers under the disgraceful dictator Pedro Sanchez and told the audience to kick the socialists out, because Spain is the cradle of liberalism. He also called Sanchez a thief and corrupt.
The foreign ministry’s response was formal and sharp. It condemned Milei’s comments, made during an unofficial visit, as insults and slander and as external interference, attacks and insults against a democratically elected prime minister, and said it is shameful that a person holding the highest office in a sister nation visits with the sole aim of fostering a climate of polarisation and violence among Spaniards. Milei met Madrid regional president Isabel Diaz Ayuso and spoke by video call with Vox leader Santiago Abascal, endorsing the Spanish right; Popular Party leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo did not meet him.
Sanchez converted the visit into campaign material within hours. At a rally in Burgos he warned that Feijoo and Abascal would do with Spain what Milei is doing with Argentina if they win on November 29, contrasting Argentina’s minimum wage, which he said had fallen 40 percent under Milei, with Spain’s, up 66 percent under his government. Those figures are the prime minister’s campaign claims, carried here as his argument rather than as verified statistics.
The election context is a premiership in peril. Sanchez, in office since 2018, called the early election on October 5 after lawmakers voted against housing reforms drawn up after nationwide protests over the housing crisis. Polling reported in the coverage puts the Popular Party first but short of a majority, which would give Vox the decisive say in forming a government. Milei’s intervention is unlikely to move that arithmetic directly, but it has already reorganised the campaign’s argument: the socialists are running against a reactionary international, and the right must decide how close to stand to a foreign president who insulted the sitting prime minister on Spanish soil.