Sergio Massa

Sergio Tomás Massa (born 28 April 1972) is an Argentine politician who served as Minister of Economy from 2022 to 2023.

Massa was born in the western Buenos Aires suburb of San Martín in 1972, to Italian parents.

His father was born in Niscemi, Sicily, and his mother in Trieste, Friuli Venezia Giulia.

He was raised in the neighboring San Andrés.

He attended St Augustine's primary and secondary schools, and later enrolled at the University of Belgrano, a private university in the upscale Buenos Aires borough of the same name.

He left school before completing his law degree studies and married Malena Galmarini.

Her father, Fernando Galmarini, was at the time the Secretary of Sports for President Carlos Menem.

Massa became affiliated to the conservative UCeDé in 1989 as an aide to Alejandro Keck, councilman for the San Martín partido (which includes San Andrés).

The controversy helped lead to the 23 July resignation of Alberto Fernández, the president's Cabinet Chief, and to his replacement with Sergio Massa who, at 36, became the youngest person to hold the influential post since its creation in 1994.

He joined the ruling Justicialist Party in 1995, when the UCeDé endorsed the re-election of President Menem after the latter had sidestepped much of his populist Justicialist Party's platform in favor of a more conservative one.

In 1999, he was elected to the Buenos Aires Province Chamber of Deputies as part of the Justicialist Party list.

Shortly after a crisis led to President Fernando de la Rúa's December 2001 resignation, the Congress appointed Senator Eduardo Duhalde, a more traditional Peronist than Menem had been.

Acquainted with Massa through Restaurant Workers' Union leader Luis Barrionuevo (union leader), Duhalde appointed him Director of the ANSeS (Argentina's Social Security administration).

The pragmatic Massa ran on President Néstor Kirchner's center-left Front for Victory ticket during the 2005 legislative elections.

Securing a seat in the Chamber of Deputies (lower house of Congress), he forfeited it at the behest of the President, who requested that he stay on as Director of ANSeS.

Remaining at the post two more years, he oversaw the voluntary conversion of several million private pension accounts to the ANSeS' aegis when this choice was made available in December 2006.

Massa was elected Mayor of the Paraná Delta partido of Tigre in October 2007.

That year's elections also brought President Néstor Kirchner's wife, Senator Cristina Kirchner, to the Presidency.

Previously, Massa served as the Chief of the Cabinet of Ministers from 2008 to 2009 under Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

He also held the role of intendente (mayor) of Tigre twice and served as the Executive Director of ANSES, Argentina's decentralized state social insurance agency.

Enjoying large majorities in Congress, her administration suffered its first major setback when her proposals for higher agricultural export taxes were defeated on 16 July 2008, with Vice President Julio Cobos's surprise, tie-breaking vote against them.

He was persuaded to run as a stand-in candidate (who, after the election, would cede his new seat to a down-ticket name on the party list) for the ruling Front for Victory (FpV) ahead of the June 2009 mid-term elections.

Massa, however, enlisted his own candidates (including his wife) for the Tigre City Council under his own ticket, and its success in these city council races distanced him from others in the FpV.

Massa had, moreover, harbored differences with the president over a number of policies, including the nationalization of loss-producing private pension funds, the use of the INDEC bureau to understate inflation data, and the vast regulatory powers granted to Commerce Secretary Guillermo Moreno.

Following the FpV's narrow defeat in the Chamber of Deputies mid-term races, Massa tendered his resignation to the President, effective 7 July.

Massa, who appointed the city council president as provisional mayor while he served as the president's cabinet chief, returned to his office of Mayor of Tigre on 24 July.

He was investigated along with other officials for the illegal retention of "repayments" of nonexistent loans from the pensions of about 17 thousand retired while he was director of the ANSES

In 2010, Massa joined a group of eight Buenos Aires Province mayors in calling for the establishment of local police departments independent of the Provincial Police; this 'Group of 8' had become disaffected to varying degrees with the Kirchner government, and came to view Massa as presidential timber for a future date.

He stumbled into controversy, however, when the WikiLeaks disclosures of 2010 mentioned a number of indiscretions on Massa's part during a dinner hosted the previous year at the U.S. Ambassador's Residence.

He was said by one of Ambassador Vilma Socorro Martínez's cables to have revealed details about working with former President Néstor Kirchner, stating that he was "a psychopath; a monster whose bully approach to politics shows his sense of inferiority."

He reportedly added that the former president "runs the Argentine government" while his wife (the President) "followed orders," and that she "would be better off without him."

He nevertheless remained allied as a member of the FpV faction and the Cristina Kirchner administration, and was re-elected mayor on the FpV slate with 73% of the vote in 2011.

A former member of the Justicialist Party, he founded a new political party, the Renewal Front, in 2013.

Massa did not finish his law degree studies until 2013, during the campaign for the 2013 legislative election.

Polling ahead of the October 2013 mid-term elections gave Massa better prospects running for Congress under the FpV party list than on a separate slate.

Upon the filing deadline on 22 June, however, Massa ultimately opted to form his own Frente Renovador ('Renewal Front') faction with the support of the 'Group of 8' Buenos Aires Province Mayors and others, notably former Argentine Industrial Union president José Ignacio de Mendiguren (recently an ally of Kirchner).

This split with Kirchner proved successful for Massa as the Renewal Front slate beat the FpV slate in the Buenos Aires province in both the primary and general elections.

As the leader of the United for a New Alternative coalition, Massa ran for president in 2015, finishing third in the first round of voting with 21% of the vote.

Eight years later, in 2023, he ran for president for a second time as part of the Union for the Homeland coalition in October 2023, losing the November run-off to Javier Milei by a margin of nearly 12%.

From 2019 to 2022, he was the National Deputy for the centre-left coalition Frente de Todos, elected in Buenos Aires Province, and the President of the Chamber of Deputies.