Tuesday April 25, 12 noon.
Economy is abuzz. The four televisions he has Sergio Tomas Massa In front of his desk, they show live the numbers that mark the pulse of the country. They are all truly worrisome, but the one that is now following the most attention is the price of the blue dollar. $495 says the screen, and marks the all-time nominal record. In a matter of minutes it can climb to 500, a step that is scary to imagine and would mean that the currency rose $100 in just 12 days. From the fifth floor of the ministry you can clearly see the abyss.
The Tigrense activates another screen. He communicates with Alberto Fernández. Although they have known each other for decades and at one point had a great back and forth, the relationship is now very acrimonious. They speak every day, but no one is mistaken: they do so because the circumstances do not allow the slightest margin for error, although, the minister thinks but does not say so, the President has been committing various blunders that have a negative impact on reality.
On the edge of danger, the president gives Massa the go-ahead with something that he has been demanding almost since he came to the portfolio.
It is a tactical decision but it is also much more. Fernández accepts that the Tigrense put one of his most trusted men, Lisandro Cleri, to control the money table of the Central Bank. The position may not sound like much, but it is key: from there that institution can intervene in the dollar market, it can operate to lower the price. It was something that Massa had been demanding harshly from the head of the Bank, Miguel Pesce, without success. If the minister’s relationship with the President is cold, with Alberto’s radical friend the case is very different: he boils with anger. “He’s a good guy, but he’s a shithead,” Massa says privately, and blames him for not having been encouraged to play hard in the previous weeks, the situation is as it is.
The green light from the president to Massa and Cleri is, then, something much deeper than a measure to contain the blue. After the forced resignation of his candidacy, Fernández is handing over his last bastion of governance, the only important official who responds to his orders in the entire economic organization chart. It is the final capitulation. And it is also Massa’s total control over this area of the Government.
Then cut the communication. He won a battle. But the war remains. That is why he seeks, minutes after speaking with Fernández, those who have the final decision. It is the IMF, which in the agreement it closed with Martín Guzmán, his predecessor, stipulated that the Central was not allowed to sell dollars to stabilize the exchange rate. How the minister convinced the unyielding Fund to change his policy on the fly is a mystery. Massa’s bishops would then circulate the idea that it was not a negotiation and that his leader simply notified them, like a general who makes a drastic decision in the middle of a firefight to save the troop. But from the corridors of Economy something else is heard: long telephone conversations with the envoys of the international organization. The IMF does not want Argentina to explode through the air. It could drag down the entire region.
Massa, with the OK of the Fund and Fernández, intervenes in the market. He sets up a Twitter thread with his press team to send the signal that the situation is under control. The Tigrense, in addition, is fast, and he sends his people to speak with priests from the media so that they give him a hand in installing this news. The next day, Tuesday the 25th, the price of blue begins to drop, in what could be a very risky move. How many dollars are there in reserves to sell to keep the dollar stable?
But Massa’s Tuesday still has one stop left. On his cell phone he has messages from his soldiers from the Renovation Front, who have been insisting that he have to formalize his presidential candidacy. At least that idea, that his own demand him to head a ballot, is the one that they circulate from Economy. Those who know the Tigrense say that this is an old trick, and that when he says “they ask me” you have to read “I want to be”. In any case, the founder of this space has orders to give to his people: that they all get ready to go to the Cristina Kirchner act on Thursday. The relationship between the vice president and the minister must be watered.
The minister leaves his cell phone and walks into another meeting. He will be at the ministry until almost midnight. He will leave like this another day in the labyrinth in which Sergio Massa is trapped.
On the border. Although the Tigrense played very hard that Tuesday and managed to surf the storm, at one point the story is almost anecdotal. Massa’s days are so dizzying, especially since the incident that started a week earlier, on Monday the 18th. It was the short-circuit with Antonio Aracre, the Nation’s chief adviser, which ended with his resignation the next day. That episode, which massismo translated as a last attempt by Albertismo to pass over them, marked – at least chronologically – the beginning of the current escalation of the parallel dollar.
From there it was that a feeling that Massa has been going through for a while was accentuated. He already had it when he was president of the Chamber of Deputies and from there he followed the open-air fights between Cristina and Alberto. It can be summed up in his own words. “I’m swollen balls.” It is a formula that he uses more and more to refer to aspects of his political life. Aracre -Massa thinks- circulated a report among the media where he spoke of a devaluation. “I am swollen the balls of these operations of the Rosada”, long the minister. Pesce does not want to intervene from the Central. “I’m swollen my balls that he’s that shitty.” Fernández, on his last trip to the United States, pays attention to Santiago Cafiero, who has come from meeting with Martín Guzmán, and instead of going to Biden with the massista plan – to seek an advance of funds because of the drought – he goes with that of the former minister: insist on eliminating the surcharges on the loan. “I am swollen balls that he does not listen to me, and above all that he gives a ball to Guzmán.” The list could go on and on. Massa, he says, is tired.
This would seem to settle as the basis of the story that his candidacy could build, although from his networks he began to use a different slogan: #CreoEnArgentina, an electoral key statement that he uses to sign his publications but that still has not convinced his team of Campaign. The speech, however, is the least of the problems.
to red. The big mess is the economy. Inflation promises to rise again in April, and it remains to be seen how the fight against the blue will end. “Massa is doing exactly the same thing that Caputo did in 2018, going out to stop the run with the reserves and against the instructions of the Fund. fifteen days later. ‘Toto’ ended up resigning,” says a City operator who alludes to the former head of the Central Bank and Macri’s finance minister. Even if he did accomplish the latter, it’s very hard to install a candidate with triple-digit annual inflation.
Massa says that by mid-May, at the latest, he will be able to renegotiate a new agreement with the IMF. One that contemplates the profound impact that the drought had on the reserves and that, therefore, advances 10 billion dollars for those days, at the latest by June. For now it’s just a wish, although it’s clear that without that early outlay reaching December seems like a chimera.
The red-hot economy has a curious effect on Massa’s psychology, and perhaps that is why he is so short-tempered. It is that, on the one hand, the control of the Argentine macro was out of his reach. Even with the Central under his hands, such thin reserves put limits on his ability to change the situation.
And that collides with a reality: after Fernández’s resignation, many planets of the Frente de Todos begin to align behind Massa. He had not had such support, at least since the first months of 2015, when an important part of Peronism clasped behind him and whispered in his ear that he would be the next President. The tiger, then, dominates a part of politics, while the economy eludes it.
Chess. Although CFK has not made a statement yet, there is a clear endorsement of his management -out of love or out of necessity- and a wave of rumors that are beginning to establish that the Minister of Economy would have his support. “If she says so, let’s go with Massa,” said AFIP’s titular Christian supporter, Carlos Castagneto, these days. On the other side of the crack they also came out to support him. “Many of us see that Sergio has the conditions to be a candidate,” said the head of the UOCRA, Gerardo Martínez, the trade unionist who, in the middle of a tussle between Alberto and CFK, handed the President a pen in an act and told him to “use it.” .
From the Tigrense team, in addition, they insist that the logic of the economy does not leave room for another possibility. “Many are looking at the numbers for PASO, but that is August. Before is June 25, the day after the lists close. If that morning the newspapers do not say that the candidate is Sergio, the markets will explode,” they say. It is a logic that begins to emerge from that ministry: it is Massa or “the end”, as Malena Galmarini implied in a tweet (see box).
There is also another stumbling block. The President continues to insist that there be an inmate within the ruling party. It is, in fact, the last flag he has left to hold. And those who would go in the Albertista formula, Daniel Scioli and Victoria Tolosa Paz, swear that they do not intend to get off. And that is a problem: although with eventual support K Massa would comfortably win that contest, an intern in this cracked instance of the Frente de Todos could be explosive. The last of these that took place within Peronism, between Aníbal Fernández and Julián Dominguez in 2015, was a succession of cheap shots that ended in scandal and Fernández losing to Vidal. Opening that Pandora’s box, especially with the economy on edge, can be dramatic.
This is how the horizon appears for Massa. All the paths in this labyrinth are full of thorns and have an uncertain ending. A false step can be very expensive. Can he find the exit?
