Mauricio Macri
Mauricio Macri was president of Argentina from 2015 to 2019, the first elected president since 1916 who was neither a Peronist nor a Radical, the heir to a construction fortune who had been president of the Boca Juniors football club and mayor of Buenos Aires, who beat the Kirchners' candidate in the run-off of November 2015 by two and a half points, lifted the currency controls and settled with the holdout creditors in his first months, borrowed on the international markets as no government had, including a hundred-year bond. In 2018, when the money left, took the largest loan the IMF had ever made, fifty-seven billion dollars, on terms the country could not meet. He lost the election of 2019 in the first round to the ticket on which Cristina Kirchner had put herself second, with inflation at fifty per cent and the peso at a third of its value. He was born in 1959 in Tandil, the son of the Italian-born industrialist Franco Macri, whose group built roads, cars and the country's postal service under contracts with every government. He was kidnapped in 1991 by a gang of federal police officers and held twelve days for a ransom his father paid, which he said was the beginning of his politics. As president of Boca from 1995 to 2007 he won seventeen titles and a following, founded the PRO party in 2005, and was elected mayor of the capital in 2007 and 2011, building the bus corridors and the police force the city had not had. The coalition with the Radicals, Cambiemos, won the presidency on a promise of zero poverty and gradual change. The gradualism kept the deficit and the borrowing filled it. The drought of 2018 and the American interest rate rise turned the markets, the peso halved, and the Fund's programme brought the austerity gradualism had avoided. He took the country back into the world, hosting the G20 in 2018 and the Mercosur-EU agreement's signing, and left an economy in recession and a debt his successors renegotiated twice. He declined to run in 2023, his party lost the primary to Milei's, and he backed Milei in the run-off; the two have quarrelled since over who owns the right.
- Lived: 1959 CE – ?
- Nationality: Argentine
- Roles: president, businessman, politician
