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- Spain is cutting ties with Argentina as a fight about a single comment deepens.
- Argentine President Javier Milei has refused to apologise for calling the wife of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez corrupt.
- Both sides have demanded apologies.
Spain will "definitively" withdraw its ambassador to Argentina after President Javier Milei refused to apologise for calling Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's wife "corrupt", Spain's foreign minister said Tuesday.
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."
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 Socalist, recently considered resigning after Spanish prosecutors opened a preliminary corruption investigation against his wife, Begona Gomez, which was quickly closed.
Within hours of Milei's attack, Spain recalled its ambassador and Albares slammed the visiting president's "insult".
He demanded a "public apology" from Milei, saying that Madrid would not exclude the possibility of rupturing diplomatic ties. Sanchez also called on Milei to retract his comments.
However, the Argentina government slammed what it called "flashy and impulsive threats" and insisted that Sanchez's government should apologise.
Milei, a self-declared "anarcho-capitalist", won elections last November with a vow to cut Argentina's vast public debt to zero. He has instituted an austerity programme that has seen the government slash public subsidies.
But he has also become known for his controversial remarks.
There has been weeks of rising diplomatic tensions between Spain and Argentina leading up to the latest spat. One Spanish minister last month indicated that Milei took drugs.
