The measure escalates tension between the two countries, after Spain on Monday called its ambassador to Buenos Aires, María Jesús Alonso Jiménez, for consultations.
Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, announced Tuesday that his country decided to definitively withdraw its ambassador to Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“He’s definitely staying in Madrid,” Albares said at a press conference.
Argentina will continue without ambassador, he added.
The decision comes after President Javier Milei refused to apologize to the Spanish president, Pedro Sánchez, who asked him to rectify his words after the Argentine leader called his wife “corrupt.”
“I’m not going to apologize to him,” Milei said in an interview with the television channel Todo Noticias (TN), broadcast on Monday.
“How am I going to apologize if I was the assaulted?” he insisted.
The measure does not mean the breakdown of diplomatic relations. At the head of the embassy will be the businessman and, according to Albares, when the crisis is over Spain will have to appoint a new ambassador.
The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain, José Manuel Albares.
The controversy erupted on Sunday, when Milei, at a far-right convention organized by the Spanish Vox party in Madrid, harshly criticized the ideas of socialism.
Global elites don’t realize how destructive it can be to implement the ideas of socialism, because they have it too far away, they don’t know what kind of society and country it can produce, and what kind of people bolted to power, and what levels of abuse it can generate,” Milei said.
And then he improvised, “I say, even if you have the corrupt woman, you get dirty and take five days to think about it.”
On April 24, Sánchez published an open letter to the public in which he said that he needed to stop and reflect after a complaint against his wife, Begoña Gómez, of allegedly having recommended or endorsed by letter of recommendation with his signature to entrepreneurs who are running for public tenders.
The complaint was admitted by a Madrid court.
This article has been translated after first appearing in Prensa Libre