Sergio Massa, eternal candidate for the Casa Rosada and official candidate for the Presidency of Argentina, has surprised by reversing the polls and comfortably winning the first round of the presidential elections. In the absence of the second round, this 36.33% of the votes allows the current Argentine Minister of Economy to become the virtual leader of Peronism, unseating Cristina Fernández de Kirchner from this position.
Massa will face the controversial leader of the far-right party La Libertad Avanza, Javier Milei, who added 30.18%, despite polls predicting his victory.
Often called a "careerist" and harshly criticized for his political flexibility, Massa is an old acquaintance of the Argentine political front line for more than two decades, when he became part of the brief Peronist government of Eduardo Duhalde (2002-2003). , after the social outbreak of 2001.
Since then, this 51-year-old lawyer, married with two children, leader of the so-called Renewal Front within Justicialism, has gone through almost all levels of Argentine politics, from mayor of the town of Tigre (in the north of the Buenos Aires suburbs) from unsuccessful presidential candidate in 2015 to 'super minister' of Economy, the position to which he was appointed on July 28, 2022.
Despite what the polls predicted, his traumatic time at the Treasury Palace in the midst of one of the worst economic crises in Argentina's recent history has not taken its toll on him.
Massa has managed to overcome the discouraging data, the corruption scandals that have hit the heart of the ruling party in recent weeks and the lack of support among the Kirchnerist sector of Unión por la Patria.
The accommodating Peronist leader now has within reach the Presidency of the Nation that he always longed for and for which he already ran in 2015, when he could not get past the first round in which he was surpassed by the Peronist Daniel Scioli and the conservative Mauricio Macri (2015-2019), who ended up winning the presidency.
The presidential candidate for Unión por la Patria entered the political arena at a very young age, at the age of 17, as a member of the liberal Unión del Centro Democrático, which in the early 1990s was absorbed by Peronism under the Government of Carlos Menem. (1989-1999).
After the severe economic crisis that affected the country at the end of 2001, Duhalde appointed him executive director of the National Social Security Administration (Anses), in charge of the state retirement system, an organization that manages one of the main budgets of the State.
In 2005 he was elected national deputy, but resigned his seat to continue heading the National Social Security Administration at the request of then-president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007).
Two years later, in December 2007, he became mayor of the Buenos Aires municipality of Tigre, but left that position in July 2008 when he was summoned by President Cristina Fernández to occupy the Head of the Cabinet of Ministers.
In the midst of a serious political crisis after a strong conflict with the agricultural sector, Fernández turned to the rising political figure of Massa to "oxygenate" the image of the Government.
But Massa left the cabinet in July 2009, in the midst of another crisis in the ruling party due to the defeat of Néstor Kirchner in the legislative elections. That earned him the enmity of Cristina Fernández, with whom he had harsh disagreements.
After his departure from the cabinet, Massa returned to the mayor's office of Tigre, where he achieved a good reputation as an administrator, which allowed him to win re-election in 2011 with more than 70% of the votes.
Since then, the differences with Kirchnerism deepened until in the 2013 elections he again competed for deputy, but this time for his own space, the Frente Renovador, and won against the candidate of the then president, Martín Insaurralde.
The victory in the legislative elections allowed him to position himself to launch his presidential candidacy in 2015, although he ultimately failed.
For the 2019 presidential elections, Massa reconciled with Fernández de Kirchner and added the votes of his party, the Frente Renovador, to the Frente de Todos coalition, after which he was named president of the lower house with the support of the president. Gone were his postulates from years before, when in 2017 he said things like: “When back in 2013 they wanted to impose the ‘Eternal Cristina’ on us, we had the courage to stop it. If she appears again, we are going to stop her again.”
Ambitious, with a moderate tone and with good ties with businessmen, at the head of the Economy portfolio he has made countless trips to the United States for negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), for the agreement signed in March 2022 to refinance the debt incurred in 2018.
But his brilliant record as party leader contrasts with his mediocre performance in the last year as head of finances, as evidenced by uncontrolled inflation that already reaches 138.3% year-on-year, the highest since the late 1980s.
