Argentina: Macri-economics

A profile of a possible president

MAURICIO MACRI’S path to politics was an unusual one. On a winter’s night in 1991, as he was walking through his posh neighbourhood in Buenos Aires, he was attacked by three men. The assailants—corrupt police officers, perhaps—punched him in the face, bound his hands with wire and shoved him into a coffin in the back of a Volkswagen van. Mr Macri was held for two weeks before his father, a prominent Argentine businessman, paid a $6m ransom.

Mr Macri says that this trauma led him to a career in public service. He gained fame by running Boca Juniors, a football team, for a dozen years until 2007, was elected to Congress and is now mayor of Buenos Aires, Argentina’s richest and most populous city. He stands a good chance of winning Argentina’s presidential election in November.

His success does not come from personal magnetism. He rarely smiles when cameras are not present. In meetings he comes across as aloof, even apathetic. His speeches lack zest and originality. Perhaps realising he will never inspire a cult of personality, he opted to be a consensus-forger and team-builder. The party he founded and leads, Republican Proposal (PRO), started out on the right but has become more inclusive. It is non-Peronist—the political current to which his presidential rival, Daniel Scioli, belongs—but is not anti-Peronist; many ex-Peronists work alongside the party’s conservative founders.

As mayor, Mr Macri improved infrastructure, especially transport, and developed poor neighbourhoods that his predecessors had ignored. Colleagues say he encouraged them to innovate. Banco Ciudad, the municipal bank, began hiring on merit rather than connections, says Federico Sturzenegger, a PRO congressman who ran the bank.

To secure the presidency, Mr Macri will need to change the perception that he is a cold-hearted capitalist, born to privilege. “He seems to favour businesses over people, whereas I want a more inclusive government,” says Mariel García, who works at a corner shop in Palermo, a leafy neighbourhood in Buenos Aires.

While promising change, Mr Macri assures voters that it will not be too abrupt. He would end exchange controls and allow the peso to float, but has promised not to undo the nationalisation of pension funds or of YPF, an oil giant. He would leave generous welfare programmes untouched. Voters want a president who will fix the economy without leaving anyone behind. Mr Macri may be the one to convince them.