Mauricio Macri

Mauricio Macri (born 8 February 1959 in Tandil, Buenos Aires Province) is an Argentine engineer, businessman, and politician who served as the 53rd President of Argentina from 10 December 2015 to 10 December 2019. He founded the Propuesta Republicana (PRO) party in 2005 and contested the 2015 presidential election as head of the Cambiemos coalition, defeating Daniel Scioli of the ruling Peronist Front for Victory in a runoff — the first time in decades that a non-Peronist, non-Radical candidate won the Argentine presidency through the ballot box.

Before national politics, Macri was president of the football club Boca Juniors (1995–2007) and served two terms as Chief of Government of the City of Buenos Aires (2007–2015). His family business background centers on the SOCMA conglomerate founded by his father, Franco Macri.

As president, Macri pursued market-oriented reforms: lifting currency controls (the cepo cambiario), settling long-running litigation with holdout sovereign-debt creditors in early 2016 (allowing Argentina to return to international bond markets), cutting export taxes on agricultural products, and reducing energy subsidies. In 2018, facing a currency crisis and capital flight, his government negotiated a Stand-By Arrangement with the International Monetary Fund — initially announced in June 2018 and expanded later that year to roughly US$57 billion, then the largest in IMF history.

On foreign policy, Macri realigned Argentina toward the United States, the EU, and the OECD accession process, and was a vocal critic of Nicolás Maduro's government in Venezuela. Argentina hosted the G20 Leaders' Summit in Buenos Aires in November 2018 under his presidency.

He lost his 2019 re-election bid to Peronist Alberto Fernández, with Cristina Fernández de Kirchner as running mate. Macri remained a leading opposition figure within PRO and Juntos por el Cambio, though by 2023 PRO's electoral leadership had largely passed to figures such as Patricia Bullrich and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta.