Buenos Aires — Argentine Economy Minister Sergio Massa’s candidacy is now confirmed for the October 2023 elections in Argentina. While both Eduardo “Wado” de Pedro and Daniel Scioli had made their pre-candidacies official, Massa finally entered the race on June 23, to head the ruling coalition’s campaign to retain the Casa Rosada from December 10.
Although Massa is not the first Argentine economy minister to seek the presidency, he is the first one to try to jump directly from the Treasury. But in which mirror is he aiming to reflect himself? Probably in that of Brazil’s former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, although the main difference lies in the fact that Cardoso’s platform was nothing less than the sharp deceleration of inflation, something that Massa is still far from achieving.
In spite of this, Massa seems to be the last card of the ruling party in the face of the elections. At least that is what is reflected in opinion polls, which give him a considerable advantage among voting intentions with respect to his internal competitors of the Unión por la Patria coalition.
How popular is Massa in the polls?
According to a private survey to which Bloomberg Línea had access, Massa is the best pollster among those competing for the nomination of Unión por la Patria.
Massa has a voting intention of 12.1%, more than double that of Axel Kicillof (5.5%), Wado de Pedro (5.4%) and Daniel Scioli (4.1%). The survey does not include data regarding the intention to vote for Juan Grabois, who, after Massa’s entry, has re-entered the presidential race.
Massa gathers almost 45% of the votes that the candidates of the ruling party would have, and which could translate into 27.1%.
According to the survey, Unión por la Patria would be more than three percentage points below the opposition coalition Juntos por el Cambio, whose candidates would have 30.8% of the votes.
If, on the other hand, the voting intentions for individual candidates are analyzed, Massa would share third place with Patricia Bullrich (12.1%) and behind Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (12.6%), the main candidates of Juntos por el Cambio.
The most voted-for pre-candidate according to the aforementioned survey, meanwhile, would be Javier Milei, who would obtain 25.5% of the votes.
In spite of this, if after the primaries (called the ‘PASO’) on August 13 the most-voted candidates of Unión por la Patria and Juntos por el Cambio retained all the votes, the leader of La Libertad Avanza would not be able to get into an eventual runoff, since 25.5% would leave Milei behind the ruling party (27.1%) and Juntos por el Cambio (30.8%). This, however, will depend on the assumption that the primary votes retain a high percentage of the votes of the candidates who do not pass the primaries.
Proof of the difficulty involved can be seen in the fact that the survey also analyzed the scenario in which the only candidates of Juntos por el Cambio were Rodríguez Larreta and Bullrich, as it turned out to be the case.
The results show that Larreta, head of the Buenos Aires government, would obtain 15% of the votes and Bullrich 14.3%. This implies that without the pre-candidatures of Gerardo Morales (2.9% - he will accompany Rodríguez Larreta in the ticket -, Facundo Manes (1.9%) and José Luis Espert (1.3%; also on Rodríguez Larreta’s list), the voting intention for Juntos por el Cambio dropped from 30.8% to 29.3%, a point and a half less.
The same happened in the case of Unión por la Patria: there, taking Axel Kicillof and Wado de Pedro out of the menu of options, and leaving only Daniel Scioli (8.2%) and Sergio Massa (17.3%), the ruling party went from 27.1% to 25.5%. Milei, on the other hand, climbed from 25.5% to 25.8%, leaving his party in second place.