Who is Sergio Massa, the new ‘super minister’ of Argentina?

( Spanish) — Sergio Massa is the new “super minister” of economic affairs in Argentina, an announcement that came this week after a strong ministerial restructuring by President Alberto Fernández.

With these changes, Fernández made a restructuring of a triangular table of power of the government coalition, the Broad Front, where Vice President Kristina Fernández and the now superminister, Sergio Massa, are also seated.

And with a superministry, the side of the table where Massa is sitting has expanded in power, since this position will be the result of the combination of the Ministries of Economy, Productive Development and Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries. And although Massa came out the winner, the decision also had consequences, leaving “political wounded” who left the presidential cabinet. The latter were ministers that Fernández had also summoned in times of upheaval.

Who is Sergio Massa?

Serge Massa (Buenos Aires, 1972) is a lawyer and politician with a centrist ideology, who from a very young age, at the age of 27, began in politics as a provincial deputy from Buenos Aires. At that time, in 1999, he was the youngest member to be elected to Congress.

Massa’s political career, now 50 years old, took a leap in years with his appointment in 2002 as executive director of the National Social Security Administration, ANSES, a position he held until 2007, when he was elected mayor of the town of Tigre. , a municipality north of the capital, Buenos Aires.

The following year he had to take a break from his duties as mayor and would have his first position in the high government, since the then president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner called him to be the chief of the Cabinet of Ministers, to replace Alberto Fernández, who today named him “super minister”. He held that position for a year.

After losing the midterm elections in 2009 along with Néstor Kirchner and Daniel Scioli as candidates for the ruling party, on July 25, 2009 he returned to his duties in Tigre, a job that earned him re-election as mayor in 2011.

the power games

Massa distanced himself from the national government at that time and in 2013 broke with Kirchnerism and created his own party, the Renovating Front. In those elections he obtained a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, representing the province of Buenos Aires.

In 2015, he launched his candidacy for the Presidency, facing the official Daniel Scioli and the opposition Mauricio Macri.

Back then, with a strong candidacy, he launched strong attacks against Kirchnerism saying: “I’m going to be president because corruption disgusts me. I’m going to put them in jail, I’m not afraid of them.”

Sergio Massa was in third place.

So, with a strong electoral base, which allowed him to obtain five million votes, Massa increased his political power, later consolidating himself as a deputy and since 2019 he was president of the nation’s Chamber of Deputies.

However, his political movements led him to form the Frente de Todos in 2019, a center-left coalition with which Alberto Fernández was elected, and brings together three power fronts: Fernández, Fernández de Kirchner and Massa, who today divide that power in the Argentine government, this time as super minister of economic affairs.

“I have no doubt that the Argentine economy has enormous vectors to grow, to recover in the domestic market -70% of GDP- and to increase turnover from the improvement of its exports,” Massa told in an interview. in October 2021, when he was still president of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies.

It remains to be seen if his appointment will mark a before and after in the government of Alberto Fernández or if there will be new power moves in the Argentine government.