MADRID — A diplomatic crisis sparked by Argentina President Javier Milei calling Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s wife “corrupt” deepened on Tuesday with the “definitive” withdrawal of Madrid’s ambassador to Buenos Aires. Spain withdrew its ambassador to Argentina at the weekend and Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares said that the envoy “will remain definitively in Madrid. Argentina will no longer have a Spanish ambassador”.
“We did not provoke this situation, but it is the government’s obligation to defend the dignity and sovereignty of Spanish institutions,” Albares told a news conference following a regular weekly cabinet meeting. “There is no precedent for a head of state coming to the capital of another country to insult its institutions and blatantly interfere in its internal affairs,’ he added. Argentina’s outspoken president caused outrage with an attack on socialism at the weekend while at a Madrid conference organised by the far-right Vox party.
“The global elites don’t realise how destructive it can be to implement the ideas of socialism,” Milei said. “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.
” Sanchez, a Socialist, recently considered resigning after Spanish prosecutors opened a preliminary corruption i.
