A minister in the government of Argentina’s Buenos Aires province, the country’s largest, has sparked controversy by suggesting that it could seek to become independent.

Jorge D’Onofrio, who is transport minister in the province’s left-wing Peronist administration, said in a radio interview that if it were a nation in its own right, it would have the “biggest GDP in Latin America”.

He described the policies of Argentina’s national government, led by right-wing libertarian President Javier Milei, as “madness” and accused him of destroying the nation.

D’Onofrio’s comments mark the latest round of a power struggle between Argentina’s central government and its biggest region.

Buenos Aires province is at odds with the Milei administration on a number of issues, including transport policy.

The province, which does not include the city of Buenos Aires itself, is home to about 17.5 million people, which is nearly 40% of Argentina’s population.

Its main city is La Plata, which has a metropolitan area with nearly one million inhabitants.

It is one of five provinces still governed by the opposition Peronists, who lost the national presidency to Milei in elections nearly a year ago.

The province’s governor is Axel Kicillof, an economist who has close ties to the Peronist faction led by ex-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Peronism, the political movement founded by the late President Juan Perón in the 1940s, dominated Argentine politics for many years, but Milei’s victory in October 2023 has left it in disarray.

In an interview on Radio Splendid, D’Onofrio said: “I could be proposing today as a leader of Buenos Aires that we go to a constitutional reform to see if we get out of the national state.”

He added: “If the province of Buenos Aires were a state today, it would have the richest GDP in Latin America.”

He added that he did not think independence was the way forward, but that it was “a debate that we Buenos Aires citizens have to have, because we produce 45% of Argentina’s wealth and we collect 22% of revenue sharing, subsidising the inefficiency of the rest of the national state and the provinces.”

The national government has just put forward plans to deregulate bus services, but Kicillof has warned that his province will not comply.

If D’Onofrio has his way, the tussle could escalate even further. The transport minister said Buenos Aires even had the power to issue its own currency if it wanted to.

But the idea was soon shot down by Luciano Laspina, a member of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies who belongs to the party of centre-right ex-President Mauricio Macri.

“The proposal to make the Province of Buenos Aires independent from the Argentine Republic – made by one of Kicillof’s ministers – is the most ridiculous thing that has been said in years,” Laspina said in a post on X.