September 29, 2013
Rising Peronist ready to challenge Fernández
By Benedict Mander in Buenos Aires
Sergio Massa, Argentina's leading opposition candidate for congress ©AP
Sergio Massa: rising political star in Argentina
As he ducked stones and rotten eggs during a political rally in a downtrodden suburb of Buenos Aires last weekend, Sergio Massa, the rising star of Argentine politics, must have wondered if it was a taste of things to come.
Although Argentine bond prices rallied after the youthful mayor of Tigre, a district in Buenos Aires province, trounced President Cristina Fernández’s preferred candidate in congressional primaries in August, the sudden emergence of Mr Massa has been anything but cheered by the president’s most loyal supporters, who were blamed for the ambush.
The ascent of the business-friendly Mr Massa, who is shaping up to be Ms Fernández’s biggest rival in midterm legislative elections on October 27, has been made possible by ebbing support for the president’s autarkic economic policies and the country’s need to find a new approach – not least towards its international creditors.
But there is something unusual about the rise of Mr Massa, who is one of the strongest potential candidates for presidential elections in 2015. It is taking place within the same political movement from which Ms Fernández comes: Peronism, Argentina’s unique contribution towards global political thought.
Often likened to Mexico’s PRI, which held on to power for seven decades until 2000 and has recently regained control of the presidency, the ideologically agnostic Peronist movement is famed for its ability to reinvent itself.
“Peronism uses ideologies as though they were suits in a wardrobe, which it changes depending on the season,” said Ricardo Alfonsín, an opposition leader. “In winter, of course, you wear a winter suit, and in summer a summer suit.”
As the summer of the China-fuelled commodity boom turns to autumn, the need for Argentina to change suit is clear. And it will not be long before it does, according to polls indicating that it will be all but impossible for Ms Fernández to win the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution so she can run for a third term.
Among the list of Argentina’s problems are an economy burdened with twin current account and budget deficits and isolation from international markets since its debt default in 2001.
Mr Massa acknowledged the problems this summer. “It’s important that we had a policy of reducing debt in the past since it allowed us to restructure and begin again,” he told a business audience. “But it’s important to understand that in a world with enormous liquidity, there are also opportunities that we are missing out on.”
Ms Fernández’s imperious style has also worn down voters tired of corruption, with some of her closest aides dogged by scandal. Only last week Guillermo Moreno, the commerce secretary, was prosecuted for “abuse of authority”.
“The bells are tolling – and everyone knows for whom,” said Juan Carlos Torre, a sociologist at Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires and expert on Peronism. “As soon as it is proved that Cristina’s reign is over, her followers will abandon her en masse for another leader, so that Peronism can stay in power.” Mr Massa, who pollsters say could more than double in October the 5 percentage point lead over Ms Fernández’s candidate that he achieved in the August primaries, offers a more pragmatic approach. Although he comes from the same party as Ms Fernández, almost anything is possible within Peronism, a nationalist populist movement with working-class roots that now contains many factions, often with contradicting beliefs. Even the Pope described himself as a Peronist, as did former president Carlos Menem, an economic liberal responsible for many of the policies that Néstor Kirchner, and his successor and wife Ms Fernández, spent the past decade undoing. However, it is unlikely that Mr Massa would offer a radical break with the past. For one, he was Ms Fernández’s cabinet chief in 2008-09. Second, he has suggested so himself. “The economy has stagnated but the solution is not to devalue or cut spending,” he said last month. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013. Source: www.ft.com
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