Sergio Massa, the Argentine Economy Minister who is playing his last card to be president

It is not surprising then that without being an economist, but a lawyer, he is in charge of the Ministry of Economy. Nor should it be surprising that, being part of the Peronist right, he was chosen by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, champion of a left-wing theoretical, for the October presidential elections, after going through the August primaries.. It should not even be surprising that this moment that Peronism as a whole was waiting for so much, supporting his candidacy, arrives with uncontrolled inflation and the country with negative reserves in the Central Bank.

Sergio Massa can do anything, until reality tells him “no”, as happened, for example, in the 2015 elections, in which he saw from the outside the ballotage won by Mauricio Macri. But, in the meantime, the 51-year-old politician is squaring the circle, because he is getting along worse and worse with President Alberto Fernández, former President Kirchner hates him and the Peronist left resists with a relatively token candidate, Juan Grabois, who will lose the primaries and will have to stand in the column before what many present as the best friend of the United States embassy in Argentina.

“Argentina has a dual thing in the relationship with the United States,” Massa said during an interview with this journalist on a tour of Washington DC in 2021.. Fernández de Kirchner's Chief of Staff for a year, Massa always took pains to cultivate his ties with power in the north, and that commitment is paying off.

It's not just that his candidacy reassures the White House, which sees him as a “rational Peronist,” but it's the Joe Biden administration, through his Western Hemisphere adviser.. Juan Sebastian González, Massa's main ally at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). There, many career officials tremble at the thought that they could be put in charge of the Argentine case, which has ostracized many in recent decades after colliding with an impossible economy and governments of all stripes.. There, Germany and Japan are fed up with Argentina and its unfulfilled promises, they demand toughness. Massa calls for flexibility after a fierce drought that caused the country to lose 20 billion dollars, and in this request he has Washington's understanding.

LIBERALISM

A Massa who at the age of 11 was dazzled by Raúl Alfonsín, the re-founder of Argentine democracy and a member of the Radical Civic Union (UCR), the historic rival of Peronism. A Massa who, as a teenager, fell in love with Álvaro Alsogaray's UCeDé, the party that in the 80s tried to install liberalism as a political option only to end up being engulfed by Peronism in its Menemist version. In other words, because of savage neoliberalism, according to the Kirchners, who during the ten years of Carlos Menem's government between 1989 and 1999 supported the main lines of his policies.

Massa will have to face the winner of the primaries in Juntos por el Cambio, the opposition coalition to Peronism, in October. His rival could be Patricia Bullrich, former Minister of Security and representative of the hardest wing. Or it could be Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, head of the Government of the city of Buenos Aires and a champion of moderation.. Rodríguez Larreta and Massa have been friends for decades, but the Buenos Aires mayor now alleges that their friendship has cooled and that they no longer see each other.

Massa's other important rival will be Javier Milei, a phenomenon that is difficult to classify: ultra-liberal, libertarian and often outrageous, he has the merit of having set up a discussion different from the usual in Argentina, returning to the stage some of Alsogaray's liberal proposals that dazzled Massa in the 1980s.. Milei promises dollars for everyone, and there are business and power ties that connect him to Massa.

“I'm going to confess something to you,” Massa told Michael Shifter, then president of the Washington think tank Inter American Dialogue, in 2021.. “For a long time my political career was marked by challenges to more. It happened to me that all the time more than enjoying my responsibility and my moment I thought about what was coming. I suppose that due to my frustrations and my own mistakes I learned to do well what I had to do and not think about tomorrow.”

The phrase is one of the most unlikely that has been heard in recent years in Argentine politics, because the truth is that, since he believed it was possible, Massa has not let a day go by without weaving the warp that he hopes will lead him to the presidency.

And there are people who warn that a President Massa would be a danger for Argentina.

“He is a person that I accused of corruption, of ties to drug trafficking. And if he wins, it would be repeating Argentine history. Again familism, again a man and a madness for power. Folie à deux means madness for two, here it is the madness of power”.

– And who are the two?

Massa and Malena. It is the corsi e ricorsi of Néstor and Cristina”.

The one speaking in Clarín is Elisa Carrió, leader of the Civic Coalition, a group of social democratic roots, a split from the UCR, which has functioned for more than 20 years as a kind of severe social conscience of the country.. She denounced the corruption of Kirchnerism when no one did, and if many former officials went to prison it was thanks to her.

When he talks about “Massa and Malena” he refers to Malena Galmarini, Massa's wife and daughter of a former Menem Sports Secretary. Galmarini has as much or more ambition than her husband, which is saying a lot. And Carrió sees in both the repetition of the tandem formed by Néstor and Cristina Kirchner from 2003. Galmarini today chairs the state drinking water company, Aysa, but aspires to be mayor of Tigre, a municipality north of Buenos Aires that was the first step in Massa's ascent as of December. There, seducing the middle classes with the installation of security cameras to reduce crime, he also began his admiration and relationship with Rudolph Giuliani, former mayor of New York.

Luis Petri, Bullrich's vice-presidential candidate, put his finger on the sore spot in mid-2022. It was after the assumption of Massa as Minister of Economy: “It seemed like a transfer of command. What happened today is that Cristina Kirchner changed her political figurehead. Cristina took early retirement from a president.”

Sergio Massa, with his wife, Malena Galmarini, during an official act. BREAK WITH KIRCHNERISM

Quite a striking twist, though not unexpected. Massa had broken with Kirchnerism in 2013, when he founded the Frente Renovador and presented his own list outside Peronism in the midterm parliamentary elections.. He defeated the ruling party in the province of Buenos Aires, the country's main district, and his campaign manager was today's president Alberto Fernández, also at odds with the then president. Those elections determined the end of the Kirchnerist dream of “Cristina Eterna”, the indefinite re-election after reforming the Constitution.

Thus, just a decade ago, Massa was the idol of the middle classes and anti-Kirchnerism. They asked him about the Kirchnerists and he said that he would send them to prison, they asked him if he would ever return to Kirchnerism and he responded with false solemnity on television: “Never again, for me it is a finished stage.”

Never again is not a concept made for Massa. Everything can be expected of him because his ultimate goal is profoundly Peronist: to come to power by any means possible.. The more traditional Argentine business leaders, heirs to a culture of a closed and protectionist economy, view it sympathetically.. It is not by chance, crony capitalism is one of the labels most frequently attached to the minister and candidate. To the man who believes that the Casa Rosada is possible, even though inflation is 130% per year, even though poverty exceeds 40%. Stranger things have been seen in Argentina.