Serge Massa He was active all weekend. He wanted, although he did not expect it for Saturday, the resignation of Martin Guzman. In fact, he wanted something more than that: aware of the resignation, he finally sought to impose his idea of ”rethinking” the Government, a rearmament that would have him at the helm. head of ministers and control of various springs of the Executive -AFIP and Central-, among them that of the vacant Economy. It was something he had done when the resignation of Matias Kulfas, a month ago. “I explained and explained, but Alberto Fernandez does not share the idea. I understood it, but I did not agree, ”she explained in those days. Now the situation, with the government and the dollar on fire, has repeated itself.
in the sights. On Saturday June 4, Sergio Tomas Massa couldn’t sleep a wink all night. And that had been a long day. His rest day, always limited, had been interrupted by an unscheduled visit to the Quinta de Olivos. That afternoon Alberto Fernandez He had decided to fire Matías Kulfas and, with quick reflexes, the Tigrens had gone to the scene of the events to see if he could change the course of history. As he tossed and turned in the bed he shares with Malena Galmarini, the president of the Chamber of Deputies was haunted by an idea that is beginning to be familiar to him: the feeling that, although everyone listens to him, although many tell him they are right, few pay attention to him. That day – that night – the person responsible for the insomnia was the President, to whom he had commented for hours on the need to “rethink” the entire Government, not to simply change name for name. When he found out that the replacement was Daniel Scioli, he realized that all the effort had been in vain, and then he had to accept reality. That night he was not going to be able to sleep.
However, Massa is not the only one who is losing sleep. Contrary to the weather, within the Renovating Front the temperature does not stop rising. It is a anger generated by the course of the Government, the impotence that causes them to see the gestation of that electoral black hole that promises to swallow everyone in 2023, and that, rushed by the clock, begins to insistently seek some north. The massist troops urge Massa himself to define his future and that of the rest of his space. Let him break, bend, or anything that cuts with inertia. No one within the Renovating Front sleeps peacefully these days.
What’s up, General. Massa’s cell phone was a hotbed in recent weeks. “When are you coming?”, “Why don’t you present the relief law to the monotributistas or the Earnings law here?”, were some of the messages that were coming to him, inviting him to show himself on tours of the territory. There were also some less friendly. “Sergio, you have to get out of the box.” “The box” is the Chamber. Several in the Renovating Front think that his work in Deputies has him locked up in Tigre, that he cannot or does not want to get out of that agenda. In truth, the underlying concern there points not only to his institutional task, but also to his role within the Frente de Todos. Many understand that Massa is wasting his political capital, his votes, his figure and his time trying to mend and bring together the other two parts of the ruling party, which is bleeding to death in an open-air war. Following that logic, the fear is that, if the government goes under, it will sink the Tigrense and his troops with it, even when they are trying to get the water out of the ship. In that boat there are more and more those who are beginning to look with interest at the idea of abandoning the Front of All. “Sergio is told that he is right when he speaks, when he proposes to change an issue, but later that does not translate into reality. It is urgent to create a leadership table, institutionalize the Front to resolve our differences there and design a road map,” Jorge D’Onofrio, Buenos Aires Minister of Transportation and one of the bishops of massism in that province, tells NEWS.
In fact, all this was going to be discussed at the summit that the Renovating Front was going to hold in Mar del Plata on July 15. The meeting, planned as a Buenos Aires but that was really going to be with figures from all over the country, had already suffered three suspensions in the past. The original date was April 23, but it had been moved to April 30 because it coincided with the first anniversary of the tragic death of Mario Meoni, the former Minister of Transport who had been one of the founders of the space. But then it was postponed again, citing scheduling problems. Now, the excuse for putting the meeting on standby is that it coincided with the start of the winter holidays, and that getting accommodation for 6,000 people during those days -the minimum that massism hopes to transfer to the seaside resort- was going to be almost impossible. But, with the recorder off, several popes of the renovators admit another reason. “The spirit is difficult and in this type of meeting, so broad, it can jump the key to someone. Until we have a clearer line, it will be difficult to do it, ”says a politician who deals daily with Massa.
But the fear of some possible outburst -like the one suffered by the Buenos Aires deputy of the massismo Rubén “el Turco” Eslaiman, who tweeted complaining about Scioli’s appointment because he understood that he had been “the worst governor in history”, a publication that did not last long before being deleted – is not the only explanation. There is also the political justification: such a congress would have to come with some definition. For example, the one that was requested in the previous Buenos Aires congress, at the beginning of March in Las Heras, in which the massista troops came out with the idea of seeking to install, at least for the PASO, a candidate of their own in each council and each administration. from the province. The problem, then, is visible. What would happen within the ruling party if in that future congress the soldiers of the Tigrense ask him, in public and out loud, to compete for the presidential intern of 2023? Or if D’Onofrio is asked to seek to be the next governor? Not only that. How many would believe, if this happens, that this request was not the product of a political trick by the ever-moving Massa? In that space he still resounds, like the ghost of Christmases past, the nickname “Ventajita” with which Mauricio Macri baptized him, one of the few measures of the engineer that resist the passage of time.
Massa, in these days, tried to cut those speculations of rennet. In a message that he sent to the group that brings together the priests of the Renovating Front, he was forceful. “Guys, we are in a coalition. If it’s time to clench our teeth, we’re going to do it, but no one is going to leave the Front of All. We are here to help. If you want to propose something, come with solutions, not criticism.”
Tomorrow is better? This week Antoní Gutiérrez Rubí, the Catalan consultant who works for Massa but who since the last elections extended his influence to Alberto and CFK, landed in Buenos Aires again. The numbers that the Spaniard brings, for the massismo, are conclusive: 80% of the voters of the Front of All want the unity to be maintained, while 60% say they want to see the Tigrense in a position “of more prominence in the decision making”. Something of all this is going around in Massa’s head.
The president of the Chamber comments on these ideas with Alberto. He did it on that long Saturday in Olivos, he did it during the tour to the United States for the Summit of the Americas, and also on the return trip from the G7 meeting in Germany, where the two of them traveled alone for an hour and a half in a car, even the plane that brought them back. He did it again this weekend with fury, after Guzmán’s departure.
The big issue that occupies the Tigrense today is that of “rethinking” the Government, an idea that he also discussed and made with Rubí. The idea would be to rethink it to the Executive from three steps: first, to prepare a program with the common points between all the sectors of the ruling party, then to design a profile of the requirements that those who can bring that program to reality should have, and finally to choose the names. The fact that Alberto has done the exact opposite of this when he appointed Scioli and Silvina Batakis – change piece by piece without touching anything else – is what keeps Massa awake. This rearming, furthermore, would come with a total transformation of the Cabinet: arming large thematic ministries, if possible less than ten, which in turn have important political cadres as second lines. There is also the idea of putting an end to ministries parceled out between the different forces. At this point, it seems clear that Alberto does not share this idea.
The President also knows that he has to keep Massa close. That’s why he put it up, even though he wasn’t in the original plans, on his last two flights. The president of the Chamber is one of his last three bridges – the other two are the minister “Wado” de Pedro and the deputy Eduardo Valdés – with Cristina. In fact, the tigrense had a long meeting with her before traveling to Los Angeles, and has a daily dialogue. The vice president is very active: she also spoke again, two weeks ago, with Martín Redrado, in a talk in which she shared her concerns about the lack of dollars. The economist is within the massista team, and is one of those who always dream to occupy the chair of Economy.
Near future. “If they want to push Scioli, you don’t know the mess we’re going to create.” The phrase is from one of Massa’s shipowners. He is talking about 2023 and in turn about the not so distant past, in which the relationship between the new minister and the Tigrense broke into pieces. And, although he does not say so, there is also another truth in the background: Scioli occupies, in the political imaginary, the place of the politician beyond the crack, who speaks to the middle class, who works hard, that is, exactly the same what Massa. Hard to have room for both.
The tigress says he doesn’t want to talk about it. The positive image of him had a small rise and the negative one a slight drop, but he still “has not finished rebuilding his relationship with society”, a phrase that is often heard in the halls of Congress. However, he is making some movements that show a national idea: he chose to confront Mauricio Macri discursively, and also with Javier Milei, with whom he has already had several crosses in the Chamber. In fact, there are already stickers circulating on WhatsApp that show Massa pointing to the liberal, with the legend “behave well”. Also, in these hectic days after Guzmán’s resignation, he tried to portray himself as the coalition’s mediator. At least in rhetoric, the president of the Chamber has already entered the ring. For now, the results are not favorable: both in the resignation of Kulfas and that of Guzmán he played hard – and in a very visible way – to impose his position. Both times he left empty-handed, while his own troop asks him to stress more and some even break up. Now it is Massa who is between a rock and a hard place.
