Second round

2023-10-23 12:48:22

With more than 30 years of political career, the charismatic Sergio Massa achieved his dream opportunity this Sunday to run for the Argentine Presidency, from the position of Minister of Economy and with 140% annual inflation.

On November 19, Massa, the most voted in the first round of the elections with 36% of the votes, will face the anti-system libertarian Javier Milei, who was the favorite in the polls but was left behind with just over 30%, according to the scrutiny. of 83.26% of the tables.

LOOK: Argentina 2023 Election Results LIVE: Massa wins the first round and will contest the runoff with Milei

This is the second time that Massa has sought the Presidency, following a defeat in 2015.

Massa, who is today the main figure in Argentina’s center-left Peronist government, chose to remain in the position of minister with the idea that “the campaign is the management.”

He took office in the middle of the storm, following the abrupt resignations of his predecessors Silvina Batakis and Martín Guzmán, and was then praised by his colleagues. “Sergio took office three days before we left by helicopter,” declared pro-government leader Jorge Ferraresi, alluding to the abrupt departure of Fernando de la Rúa in 2001, during Argentina’s worst crisis.

Sergio Massa accompanied by his wife Malena Galmarini. (Photo by Emiliano Lasalvia/AFP).

A great seller

51 years old and a dialogueist, Massa has made agreements with businessmen, unions and with the International Monetary Fund. But he might not control inflation, the main concern of Argentines.

A lawyer by profession, he has the ability to show difficulties as achievements, at least among his followers.

LOOK: Javier Milei: “We are in a position to create the best Government in the history” of Argentina

“Even if he doesn’t have a plan, he constantly improvises and his promises are not kept, he always conveys the idea that he is in control of the situation and that he will find a way out,” said Diego Genoud, Sergio’s unauthorized biographer. Massa.

A skill that his rivals criticize. “He is a dangerous guy precisely because of his ability to excite people. He is capable of making a speech with a fluency and discursive effectiveness that one believes him, even though he goes completely contrary to the facts. One tends to believe Massa,” said opposition deputy Fernando Iglesias.

Massa “is only interested in the accumulation of power,” he said.

Presidential candidate Sergio Massa. (EFE/ Juan Ignacio Roncoroni).

Passionate

With a corpulent appearance, neat hairstyle and always with a photographic smile, Massa speaks slowly and modulates as if he were in a Ted Talk.

However, on more than one occasion he described himself as “passionate,” and pointed to the Italian heritage that his immigrant parents passed on to him.

“I am super passionate, for better or worse,” he explained in an interview, in which he also revealed that he had strong fights with several of his relatives, almost coming to blows with his uncle and his father-in-law.

Then he assured that he no longer handles the same level of intensity that he had in his youth: “The blows shape you,” he said.

Friends and enemies

In his political career, Massa has turned friendships into enmities and vice versa, several times. He made the leap to national politics in 2013 with his Frente Renovador, a space within Peronism that presented itself as an alternative to the government of Cristina Kirchner (2007-15), of whom he had been chief of staff and who today supports him once more.

In 2015 he was a candidate for the Presidency, but was left out in the first round of the elections that the right-wing Mauricio Macri finally won.

Before creating the Frente Renovador, between 2007 and 2008, and then between 2011 and 2015, he was mayor of the city of Tigre, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, for the alliance of then-president Kirchner. However, a few years later he distanced himself from her and even maintained that “Cristina is the past” or that “she should be in prison.” In 2019 he allied himself once more with the former president, elected vice president that year.

The Minister of Economy of Argentina and presidential candidate for the Union for the Homeland party, Sergio Massa, greets his followers on October 17, 2023. (Photo by JUAN MABROMATA / AFP).

Political family

Massa was born and raised on the outskirts of the province of Buenos Aieres and got his start in the liberal party UCEDÉ in the late 1980s. In the mid-1990s he turned his militancy towards Buenos Aires Peronism with the help of political leaders Cristina Camaño and Marcela Durrieu, his mother-in-law.

Durrieu introduced him to his daughter, Malena Galmarini, whom he married and had two children. “She hooked them, she must have liked him as Malena’s boyfriend,” recalled Fernando Galmarini, Massa’s father-in-law and former Peronist leader.

Malena, president of the state water company, serves as his promoter and defender in the political arena, whether to denounce campaigns once morest her husband in the press or to publish photos of him sleeping with the dog.

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