Mauricio Macro, the centre-right mayor of the city of Buenos Aires, was elected on Sunday 22 November to become Argentina’s 53th president.
The candidate from the Cambiemos party won with 51,40% of the votes against Victory Front’s Daniel Scioli. Macri will be sworn in on 10 December for a term of four years.
Born on 8 February 1959, Tandil, he is a member of one of Argentina’s richest families and son of the business magnate Franco Macri. He will be the first non-Peronist president since 2001.
Macri will inherit a ticking time bomb of an economy. As the country has problems with inflation, depreciation for the Argentine peso and falling reserves in the central bank.
Former president, Christina Kirchner, introduced a set of regulations to control the economy. She increased taxes and restricted exports, introduced restrictions to buying foreign currencies, restricted imports to almost zero, forced private banks and insurance companies to liquidate foreign currency holdings, used the central bank to finance the fiscal deficit and the refused to negotiate with the vulture funds.
Macri vowed to end the dollar restrictions and to unify the blue dollar currency rates on his first day in administration. Macri will probably devalue the official rate to the current blue dollar rate, which is roughly at 15 AR$/US$. He also vowed to remove all export taxes completely, on all products except soy. He will resume negotiations with the vulture funds, and address the national statistics agencies on their failure to accurately report important development indexes.
