Argentina’s Potential Next President Gives his Economic Outlook

Even though the National Deputy for the Frente Renovador party Sergio Massa won’t openly admit it, many fingers are pointing at him to succeed Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as Argentina’s next leader in the 2015 presidential elections. During the past week, Massa has gone on a mini-tour in the United States presenting his credentials to members of the public and private sector, while projecting a certain aura of the man who will bring a new political era to Latin America’s third largest economy.

For now Massa is not even the official candidate of the Renewal Front coalition, a Peronist group rival to the Kirchner administration, or as Massa puts it “a group that differs from what Argentina’s politics had long been,” that he co-founded last year. Ever since his landslide victory in Buenos Aires province in the mid-term elections, held in October 2013, he has taken the spotlight – and filled the void – as the middle-ground politician that Argentina might just need. Curiously, he defected from the official kirchnerismo views only recently (Massa was her cabinet chief in 2008-09 , when he defended her protectionist economic policy).

The official speech he brought to the U.S. – and the entourage that has accompanied him in his visits to Washington D.C. and New York, led by Martín Redrado, former central bank governor who would likely hold an important role in a future government – supports the theory that Massa will run. Further buoying his supporters, the National Deputy showed signs of being ready for the presidential challenge – though as always skirting around the issue – in an event in New York on March 27 at Americas Society/Council of the Americas....

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