In 1994, the Argentine trade unionist Luis Barrionuevo received Sergio Massa at his home, then a young activist from the Union of the Democratic Center (UCD), a liberal right-wing party. Massa was 22 years old and was about to change his skin for the first time. “In politics I have all the Indians I need, what I need is someone who can wear a jacket [una chaqueta americana] and a tie,” Barrionuevo told him, thus anointing him as a full member of Peronism. Massa came from the middle class of San Martín, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, he had studied in a private school and his father was a builder. He put on a jacket and a tie and launched with conviction into an unstoppable upward race. At 51 years old, he will try this Sunday to become president of Argentina by facing the ultra Javier Milei in the second round.
When he visited Barrionuevo, Massa had been flirting for some time with the idea of making the leap from the UCD to Perón’s party. At only 17 years old he was already participating in the neighborhood walks that Graciela Camaño, wife of the union leader and today a representative, did. When Carlos Menem won the presidency in 1989, he thought that the neoliberal ideas promoted by the leader were not too different from his own. The UCD finally ended up swallowed up by Menemism, but by then Massa had already joined the new wave. The key to his political survival lies in this ability to change ships before bad weather hits. Massa has been a Menemist, a Duhaldist, a Kirchnerist, an anti-Kirchnerist and again a Kirchnerist. This volatile ideology never distracted him from the ultimate goal: to be president.
Few know Massa as well as Camaño, the woman who introduced him to political life. “Evidently he is no longer that person from the late 1980s,” she says. “He is someone who has grown a lot, for better and for worse, because no one is perfect. “Sergio is resilient, he plays, he is not conservative, he is a guy who takes risks, does not speculate and goes to the front,” she summarizes about her dolphin, from whom she is now estranged. Going “to the front” is a value in politics. All those who know Massa agree that this is one of his main characteristics. When he took over as Minister of Economy 14 months ago, Argentina was sinking, but Massa knew that he was facing the opportunity that he had waited for so long: if he did well, he had a chance of reaching the Casa Rosada; If he failed, he simply stepped aside to start again later.
That daring, seasoned with an unconcealable ambition, comes from the cradle, Camaño recalls. “She was 18 years old and she already wanted to participate in the group leaders’ meetings. ‘If you want to get involved,’ I told him, ‘you have to have a basic unit.’ [local partidario en un barrio]. She then asked his father to pay her rent for a basic unit. His father, who was quick, said yes, but on the condition that he put ‘a true Peronist’ in charge. He called one of the guys from the construction company and made him his partner. In order to get inside, Sergio accepted the conditions,” says Camaño.
Massa is a lawyer and has two children with Malena Galmarini, with whom, in addition to a marriage, he has a political partnership. They married in 2001, months before the corralito crisis, and Carlos Menem was at the wedding. In 2002, Massa had already allied himself with Peronist president Eduardo Duhalde, Menem’s sworn enemy. Duhalde noticed this 30-year-old leader and gave him control of ANSES, the social security office in charge of the second largest budget in the State. It took Massa a few months to convince Duhalde that he should increase pensions, frozen since the 1990s. The popularity of the official who toured the media solving members’ problems grew like wildfire.
He maintained the position with the arrival of Néstor Kirchner in 2003 and only left it to run as mayor of the municipality of Tigre, on the northern outskirts of the city of Buenos Aires. He won the elections in 2007 and in July 2008 Cristina Kirchner, who had just taken office, called him for the position of Chief of Staff. He replaced Alberto Fernández, the current president, and appointed Juan Abal Medina, a renowned Kirchnerist militant, as his deputy. “I learned a lot from him, because he is a management machine. He is someone who cares more about making those principles a reality than theorizing about them,” says Abal Medina, who remembers exhausting days where Massa would write to him at four in the morning to ask him a question.
With the leadership of the Cabinet, Massa’s sinuous political path accelerated. Néstor Kirchner never completely trusted that minister who rubbed shoulders with powerful businessmen and bankers and did not demonstrate the docility that was expected of him. One of those businessmen, who asks not to give his name, says that Massa, unlike the rest of Kirchnerism, “always maintained a tough position with Venezuela and Cuba and has a good relationship with the United States.” With the banker Jorge Brito, who died in 2020 in a helicopter accident, Massa forged a “father and son” relationship that helped him “open networks everywhere.” Camaño agrees that Massa “has the most important national and international agenda in Argentina.” “I don’t think there is a politician who has not spoken with Sergio at some point,” he says.
Diplomat Gustavo Pandiani has been accompanying Massa for more than two decades and agrees with Camaño. He “he has developed in the last ten years, at least, a strategic link with the main figures of the United States and Brazil.” Pandiani, who sounds like Foreign Minister of a possible Peronist Government, has also suffered from early morning calls. “Sometimes they are a simple ‘what are you up to’. I’m sleeping, but he never disconnects,” he says.
In 2009, Massa left his position as Cristina Kirchner’s chief of ministers. Abal Medina assures that he served as a “fuse” for the defeat of Kirchnerism in the legislative elections of that year. “He left distanced, not angry. He continued, for example, talking to Néstor. I called him when Néstor died [el 27 de octubre de 2010] to let him know, and he told me that he had met with him a few days before,” he reveals. The former minister then returned to Tigre, filled his district with security cameras and raised the flag of a tough line against crime. Those were the times when he hugged Rudolph Giuliani, whom he admired as his model of security in New York. In 2013, he broke up definitively with Cristina Kirchner. Abal Medina assures that there was nothing personal, but rather that “his expectations could not be resolved and like many in Peronism he ended up separating.” If there was nothing personal, Massa took care of hiding it.
He ran as a deputy in Buenos Aires outside of Kirchnerism and with four million votes he defeated Martín Insaurralde, the president’s chosen one. Masa became a political star, the man capable of defeating “the boss.” He then believed that his time had come and launched himself into the race for the presidency. He created the Frente Renovador and presented himself as “the new Peronism.” He promised during the campaign to arrest Kirchner for being corrupt and put an end to La Cámpora, the group of Máximo Kirchner, son of the vice president, and his “gnocchi”, as they say in Argentina to state employees who earn a salary without working. . But Argentina was already looking at Mauricio Macri and Massa came third, with 21% of the votes. He then changed his skin once again. Macri adopted him as the responsible opponent, the one who would accompany him for a good part of the Government with his votes in Congress.
The closeness with Macri dried up in 2017, after the legislative elections. The Renovador Front lost allies day by day who joined the ranks of Kirchnerism, Peronists angry with their leader’s pact with Macri. A year later, Massa had another act of absolute pragmatism and joined the Frente de Todos of Kirchner and Alberto Fernández. The prodigal son of Peronism would come to power again, this time as a minority partner of the one he had promised to imprison. He took refuge in Congress, as head of Deputies, and waited patiently while he watched how the fight between the president and his vice president pushed the Government into the abyss. When the crisis worsened, power fell into his hands. All eyes fell on him again, the man who had stayed out of the fratricidal war that was bleeding the Peronist alliance dry.
Alberto Fernández finally appointed him Minister of Economy. Massa was already ready to fight the definitive battle for the presidency. His results are not encouraging: inflation exceeds 140%, GDP falls and the Central Bank’s reserves are in the red. But he was able, at least, to close a complex negotiation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to which Argentina owes the $44 billion that Macri received in 2018 as a financial bailout. The agreement allowed it to showcase its good international relations. The powerful businessman who does not want to give his name summarizes it like this: “he closed the agreement from a computer in his house speaking with officials from the IMF and the State Department.”
Kirchnerism ended up embracing this leader who once betrayed him. A question of political survival. If Massa wins the elections on Sunday, Peronism will have given a new example of ideological plasticity, with a turn towards the center-right that was unthinkable just four years ago. The scenario, however, is extremely complex and challenging. A veteran Peronist, survivor of a thousand battles, says that for Massa this is the best of all worlds. “The worse the situation is, the less he gives himself and the calmer he is,” he says. And he describes him as “a pragmatist with no interest in history, nor in moral or philosophical ideas.” “He is more of a Néstor than a Cristina Kirchner,” summarizes Abal Medina. “A man of action,” adds Camaño. Milei, his rival this Sunday, will say that he is nothing more than an exponent of “the political caste” that he promises to “exterminate.”
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