​Alea iacta est: Macri President

ARGENTINA - In Brief 22 Nov 2015 by Esteban Fernández Medrano

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With 98.4% of the total votes counted, at the moment of writing these lines, and with Macri obtaining a 2.9% lead over Scioli, there is no doubt left that Mauricio Macri will become, on December 11th, Argentina’s new president. This represents an important change in the political ideology of the Executive and with it probably a fundamentally different way of managing economic policy. In perspective, this has been quite a surprising political race. Even though back in August we already anticipated that despite Scioli’s apparent victory in the primaries, the base case scenario was a runoff in November with Macri. We also pointed out that the final outcome was not yet being written in stone, given that it depended to a large extend on third party voters, such as the Anti K Peronist. Therefore our perception of a possible Macri victory, strengthened largely after Massa expressed his implicitly supported for Macri, shortly after the general elections. But Scioli’s tomb-stone might have been his inability to differentiate himself of the Kirchner’s administration. In particular Scioli wasted the opportunity on the presidential debate on November the 15th to attract independent voters. His “scare tactics”, very much inline with the speech of the Executive, might have had more a negative side-effect on the indecisive voter. In the meantime we would not be surprised to hear soon announcement of the AC starting to negotiate with international institutions (for example Central Bank of China) credit lines to finance a liberalization of capital controls. We will follow up on this with more detail over the next days.