Eduardo González
The president of the Senate, Pedro Rollán, received yesterday Monday in Madrid the vice president of Argentina and president of the Senate of that country, Victoria Villarruel, who has become the first senior official of the Government of Javier Milei to travel to Spain since the bilateral diplomatic crisis last May (as The Diplomat had anticipated) and whose agenda does not include any meeting with the Spanish Government.
According to a press release from the Senate, Rollán (from the PP) received Villarruel in the Plaza de la Marina Española and later met with her in the Senate’s Offices of Honor to discuss “matters of parliamentary diplomacy.”
In addition, the Senate Presidency specified in another press release that the meeting was “very cordial and that Villarruel, in her “first official visit” to Spain, was “accompanied by the Argentine ambassador, Roberto Bosch.” “Both presidents have noted the historical ties that unite Argentina and Spain and have analyzed the current political situation,” added the Presidency of the Upper House.
The meeting took place when the diplomatic crisis that broke out on May 19 between the two countries has not yet been resolved, after President Javier Milei made a trip to Spain that did not include any meeting with the King or the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and in which he took advantage of his intervention at a Vox event to, without expressly mentioning Sánchez or his wife, Begoña Gómez, attack “socialism” and “people stuck in power (…) even if they have a corrupt wife and take five days to think about it.”
Milei returned to Spain on June 21, just a few weeks after Pedro Sánchez’s government decided to withdraw the Spanish ambassador in Buenos Aires, María Jesús Alonso, in response to those words. Political relations between Spain and Argentina have remained frozen since then, despite the fact that on August 20 there was a telephone contact between the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, and the Argentine Foreign Minister, Diana Mondino, and that both coincided in New York in some meetings held by the ministers of the branch on the margins of the UN General Assembly.
From an institutional point of view, yesterday’s meeting was between counterparts, since, according to the Argentine constitutional order, the Vice President of the Republic is also responsible for presiding over the Senate of the Nation.
In any case, Villarruel’s agenda does not include any meeting with the Government, despite including several events. After her meeting with Rollán, the Vice President met yesterday with the Ibero-American Secretary General, Andrés Allamand, in Salamanca. She will also participate on Tuesday in the United Nations International Conference on Victims of Terrorism, organised by the United Nations and the Government of Spain in Vitoria-Gasteiz, where she will coincide with the King Felipe VI, José Manuel Albares and the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, with whom no meeting is planned.
Villarruel will return to Madrid on Wednesday, where she will visit the exhibition “Letters from Columbus – America in the Casa de Alba” at the Liria Palace. That same day she will participate in a reception offered by Ambassador Roberto Bosch at the Argentine Residence and on Friday she will share a lunch in Madrid with Argentine and Spanish businessmen at the Argentine Embassy.
Rollán’s trip to Argentina
For his part, Pedro Rollán himself has informed the Spanish Embassy in Buenos Aires of his intention to travel to Argentina between 24 and 26 October, according to sources from the Presidency of the Senate quoted by Europa Press last week.
According to the newspaper El País, Rollán did not inform the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of this trip, but he did inform the chargé d’affaires of the Spanish Embassy in Buenos Aires, Luis Tejada (who has been acting as ambassador since María Jesús Alonso’s retirement), on September 26, even though he was under no obligation to inform the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The president of the Senate also met on September 30 with the Argentine ambassador in Madrid, Roberto Bosch, to talk about the trip, whose agenda includes his participation in a parliamentary forum on security and intelligence.
