If Sergio Massa could die and choose where to be reborn, he would say Argentina. “A thousand times,” he swore, perjuring himself. The last time he said it was surrounded by workers in a factory in Buenos Aires. It was his final election campaign, he wore a suit without a tie, he seemed close to the people and described himself as a “kid from the neighborhood”, “son of the middle class” who got ahead thanks to work. Néstor Kirchner’s great apprentice filled his presidential campaign with allusions to his mentor. With the same ease with which he speaks to a businessman, he speaks to a woman on the street or to the director of the International Monetary Fund. Versatility has helped the current economics minister overcome improbability. After separating from Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and becoming a “traitor” to this Peronism, he redeemed himself as her last hope. The return of the prodigal son, heralded as a moderate option in the face of the advance of the most recalcitrant right in Sunday’s elections.
Sergio Massa salutes during the event of the “Unión por la Patria” coalition to celebrate the Day of Peronist Allegiance at the Arsenal Stadium in Sarandí, Buenos Aires (Argentina).
With an unpredictable ideology and excessive ambition, Massa has had one idea present throughout his career: he wants to be president, whatever the cost. When he was not yet of age, he entered politics with the liberal party Unión del Centro Democrático (Ucede). While Argentina promoted Menemism in the 1990s, Massa threw himself off the pavement and embraced Peronism. There he had a meteoric career, which he planned with cunning. He delved into Duhaldism along with Eduardo Duhalde, converted to Kirchnerism when Néstor Kirchner took office, became a Christian in the government of Cristina Fernández, and experimented with Macrism when Mauricio Macri arrived. But he didn’t fully commit to any of them. He was brave enough to abandon ships when it suited him best.
An old comrade from the ranks, now part of the opposition, remembers the youthful version of the Unión por la Patria candidate as a pragmatic, more affable man with endless ambitions. To illustrate it, he uses an idea: In Argentina you can change your partner, your job or your location, but never your football team; Massa has been a fan of three clubs since he knew them: when they were young he followed San Lorenzo, later he joined Chacarita and now he swears he is a Tigre fan.
The political life of the lawyer and father of two children was just as ethereal. He was not even 30 years old when he took his first position in the federal government, as head of Argentina’s social security system. He started with Duhalde but maintained the position when Kirchner arrived. At the age of 35, he left the administration to seek mayor of the municipality of Tigre in Buenos Aires. He won the election but barely stayed in office. Fernández de Kirchner appointed him his chief of staff and the hard-working Massa returned to the starting eleven. He remained in the position for only a year and resigned when relations with his boss began to deteriorate. After his return to Tigre in 2009, the break with Kirchnerism began to emerge.
Aerial view of the conclusion of the election campaign of Sergio Massa and Buenos Aires provincial gubernatorial candidate Axel Kicillof.AGUSTIN MARCARIAN (Portal)
By 2015, Massa had already founded his own party, the Frente Renovador, and was seeking the presidency in a campaign in which Peronism was crossed by his own rift. After holding hands with the Kirchner couple at the top, he turned his election campaign into a direct attack against them. He promised to put Cristina Fernández in prison for corruption and to remove “the gnocchi of the state,” as government officials disparagingly called them. The campaign, in alliance with hardline Peronism and the right, proposed intransigence against the drug trade and the return of the armed forces to the streets for internal security tasks. These ideas earned the neighborhood kid 21% of the vote, a number that put him in third place.
The distancing from the rest of Peronism did not last long. Given the slim chances of actually taking part in the presidential elections, he joined the formula of Alberto Fernández and Cristina de Kirchner in 2019. As the third force in the alliance, he gained the presidency of Congress, where he sought refuge during the years of the pandemic and in which they tore each other to shreds in government.
The 51-year-old Massa has been almost everything in Argentine politics except as a tenant in the Casa Rosada. Last August, in the midst of an inexorable economic crisis and after the vice president forced the resignation of Martín Guzmán from the Ministry of Economy, Fernández handed Massa the keys to the government’s most unmanageable department. The politician took on the impossible task with the aim of once again putting himself in the front line of fire. His unauthorized biographer Diego Genoud accuses him of being careless. “He is able to take on functions for which he is not prepared,” says the journalist. And all to achieve the presidency.
The Ministry of Economic Affairs was a double-edged card that has yet to be defined. On Sunday we will know whether he did enough to convince the Argentines or whether he was the shovel that dug the grave. His recent speeches appealed to the once successful strategy of the most nationalist Peronism, which accuses the opposition of believing that Argentina is “a shitty country.” “It is a wonderful country,” he said, where he would be reborn a thousand times.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_