Sergio Massa look at your cellphone, scroll, he answered some messages, ignored others, then stopped one. “Look how good this is,” he said loudly and caught the attention of his companions. A friend of the businessman, whose name he avoided to utter, suggested the idea that a few hours later, after many technical consultations, the minister-candidate would announce from La Rioja: the raffle for cars and appliances in consumers and merchants who participate in “Buy without VAT”.
The Unión por la Patria (UP) bunker, the glass building on Miter Street, is a crowd of campaigners and analysts, but Massa has a wild dynamic: listens carefully to the qualitative and quantitative reports given to him by his teams but, in certain matters, he has their own focus. Before the move for the VAT refund, he told his mother Lucy and his aunt Sara to watch the TV ad and then he contacted them to see if the message was clear to them.
Massa is where he always wants to be but for the least amount of time. He puts his own skin on the line so that, beyond the campaign laboratory decisions, he acts according to his instincts in his campaign decisions.
Passion and courage intervene in these processes. There is an elusive dimension: Massa, who is in the place he always wants but perhaps in the least moment, risks his own political neck in this challenge so, beyond the decisions of the laboratory and the gurus in the campaign, In his politics and campaign. decisions he acted on according to his own instinct. He repeated, although this is not the first time he has done it, that if he loses the election his political career will be over. “That’s it, if it doesn’t happen, I’ll leave.” dice.
We need to follow up on this proposal. This is not the first time that Massa has announced that he is leaving politics. A few months ago, in fact, he assured that his position as Minister of Economy would be the last stop in a series of positions and nominations, and that he would not be a candidate for anything in 2023. He even included his son Tomás, who came to say publicly that he does not want his father to be a candidate again. Things happened, and in June, after a strong attack, the minister became a presidential candidate.
But that is another story. The proposal of the Tigrense that he leaves politics affects the establishment of a hypothetical, but likely, Peronism that is not in power. In this exercise in imagination, Massa is often seen as a determined actor in the next stage, a tension that sustains the shrapnel of Maximo Kirchner and other actors from La Cámpora such as Mayra Mendoza against the governor Axel Kicillof.
In a linear interpretation, due to his status as a presidential candidate, if Massa wins he will begin to express a new leadership of Peronism and, if he loses, he will become part of scrum of leaders who should lead the new era of PJ. “The generation of our 50s,” Massa said a week ago in an interview on Public Television when he recounted a speech with other leaders in which they talked about management because, in his words, “up there, there’s nobody there.” , in a message interpreted as what it is: that Cristina Kirchner He is no longer in the leadership pyramid of Peronism.
Oct.
The self-directed Massa, who focuses on himself and decides on measures based on suggestions from outside his Economic team, operates in the same way regarding the electoral bet. In recent days, despite the fact that the UP command outlined a tactic that consists of trying to keep Patricia Bullrich on top of the ring and to increase the dispute in the third, even if they are proportionally not Fair enough, Massa entered another key: He started projecting ultra-polarization with Javier Milei.
Proximity and odor detection will appear again. In his tours and in his talks with the leaders, Massa noticed that Patricia Bullrich outside the conversation, she does not appear like other times as a risk factor, but all the readings and movements focus on the libertarian. Faced with the difference with Bullrich, the candidate understands that the October election is heading towards ultra-polarization and that because of this, the PJ must play well to achieve the highest number. Part of a command. “Will someone who doesn’t vote in the general vote vote for you in the runoff?” he asked but, in truth, he was voicing an opinion.
October is “kill or be killed” is the slogan that emerges from the narrowest environment of Massa, although the UP campaign team acted with the logic that the 22-O election is a three-player, and that they should be polarized. and Bullrich, the trick is that they are the same, two versions of the same rights, separated at birth. Not Massa: the candidate understands that Bullrich is not in the race, he has fallen, he barely reached 20 points and is likely to fall because of his bad campaign decisions.
Consequently, October is heading for a more traditional binary dispute, where Massa expresses the ruling party and Milei is reduced as an expression of the opposition, moving Bullrich to third place, without expectation. This scenario represents an additional challenge: if, as estimated by Massa, Bullrich is in free fall and there is a risk of less than 20 points, that increases the possibility that Milei is closer to the possibility of winning the first round, with 45 points or with more than 40 and 10 difference in the second. This is not a scenario that, mathematically, they believe is possible with the Massa device.
In the same way, although in a different scenario, Massa applies the signs of electoral logic: his argument is with Milei, but he avoids as much as possible the discussion of the libertarian and confronts him directly, but instead opposes his steps by projecting what. it’s like a country ruled by Milei. In his speeches, he repeated a menu of warnings about the sale of organs and children, about the free transport of weapons – he cited massacres in the US, among armed youth – about to abolish all public education, from state kindergarten to university. .
