Eduardo González
The victory of far-right candidate Javier Milei in the second round of Argentina’s presidential elections has found its place in the growing political polarization currently being experienced in Spain and represents a new and unpredictable stage in diplomatic and economic relations between the two countries.
After a tight first round, and in spite of the polls that predicted a closer result and even gave, in some of them, the victory to his Peronist rival, Javier Milei obtained 56% of the votes this Sunday against 44% of the votes of the former Minister of Economy Sergio Massa.
As expected, the first reactions in Spain have shown that the elections were much more than an internal matter for Argentina. For the time being, the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has preferred not to make a clear statement on the electoral victory of a leader with whom, inevitably, he will have to get along in the bilateral and multilateral arena. In fact, the Executive, whose members were sworn in yesterday, has opted for silence and, for the moment, has neither celebrated nor officially regretted Milei’s victory.
In any case, Pedro Sánchez’s opinion was well defined just a few days ago during his speech in the investiture debate, in which he stated that the PP should “make them look at it” after his predecessor in office, Mariano Rajoy, expressed his support for Milei and his “delirious reactionary discourse”. “This Sunday, I hope Massa wins and not Milei,” he added.
The one who has not hesitated to pronounce herself, in a personal capacity, has been the recently renamed vice-president, Minister of Labor and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz. “It is a sad day for the democratic bloc around the world. Much encouragement to the Argentine people who today feel uncertainty and fear,” she stated through her account in the social network X.
For his part, the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, wrote through X: “Congratulations to the Argentine people for an election day where they have democratically chosen change. My best wishes for a country so closely linked to Spain and which welcomes thousands of our citizens”. Likewise, the PP spokesman, Borja Sémper, celebrated that Argentina “has turned the page” and conveyed his “best wishes” to Milei. “We will see if the choice they have decided to make brings them improvements, we hope so for them, for the Argentine citizens and for the Spaniards living in Argentina, but this is an unknown,” he said at a press conference.
The greatest euphoria, as expected, came from Milei’s great ally in Spain, Vox, whose president, Santiago Abascal, declared that “a path of future and hope is opening for Argentines. Long live Spain, long live Argentina, live free of socialism and sovereign!” In October 2022, Milei – whom former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro supports and a declared admirer of former US President Donald Trump – spoke at a Vox event in Madrid in which he stated that “socialism is the impoverishment machine.” “They decided to move the battle and the class struggle from the economic sphere to other aspects of social life to go inoculating that garbage that is socialism. So, basically this is the gender ideology, ethnic conflicts, the issue of ethnicities, the issue of native peoples, the environmentalist agenda, inclusive language… all things to destroy the values of society”, said Milei, who closed his speech proclaiming: “Long live Spain, long live Vox, long live Santiago Abascal and long live freedom”.
Bilateral relations
Under these circumstances, in view of Pedro Sánchez’s evident rejection of Milei’s victory and the latter’s no less evident rejection of the Spanish coalition government, the relations between Spain and Argentina in the coming years face an unpredictable scenario to say the least.
The almost certain new Foreign Minister, Diana Mondino, recently declared to the newspaper El Mundo that the relationship of the new Argentine government with the Spanish government will be “no less than magnificent”. However, Milei’s announcement that he will break off trade relations with “socialist” or “communist” (in his words) countries such as China and Brazil raises serious doubts in this regard. Asked by the same Madrid newspaper whether he would also cut economic relations with Spain, the then candidate Milei nodded and added: “Socialists are not defenders of freedom”.
In any case, the alleged severing of trade relations with Spain would not be easy for a president who has defended, time and again, the interests of business without state intervention and whose country is clearly dependent on Spanish investments.
Despite its strong variations from one year to the next, Spain is the second investor country in Argentina, only behind the USA, and Argentina was in 2021 the ninth destination of Spanish investment, with 3.59% of the total and 17,919 million euros. For its part, Argentina was in 2021 the fifteenth country investing in Spain, with a stock of 9,040 million euros.
On the other hand, according to data provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, trade exchange has faced various tariff and non-tariff barriers in recent years. Spanish exports to Argentina have followed in the last fifteen years a trend parallel to the evolution of the Argentine economy, growing in times of improved activity and falling in times of crisis, when Argentina usually imposes trade restrictive measures to preserve the balance of payments equilibrium. In 2022, Argentina was the thirty-fifth destination for Spanish exports.
Bilateral diplomatic relations are framed in a plurality of agreements (Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, Educational and Cultural Agreements, Investment Protection Agreement or Agreement to Avoid Double Taxation, among others) and political relations are based on the Strategic Partnership Plan of 2006, whose last update took place in 2017. “Both countries share their membership in the Ibero-American Summit system and frequently maintain common positions in multilateral forums,” according to Foreign Affairs.
Likewise, the Spanish collectivity in Argentina reaches 495,000 people and Spain is home to more than 110,000 Argentine citizens with the right to vote, distributed in six constituencies. As it happened in the previous presidential elections of 2019, only 11,300 voters participated in our country, ten percent of the registered voters (voting is not compulsory for Argentines in the diaspora, unlike the residents in the country). According to official data, Milei also swept among Argentines living in Spain, with almost 70 percent of the votes.
