Macri’s professional experience began at SIDECO Americana, a construction company which was part of his father’s Socma Group (Sociedad Macri) holding company, where he worked for three years as a junior analyst and became a senior analyst. In 1984, he worked in the credit department of Citibank Argentina in Buenos Aires. Macri joined Socma Group the same year, and became its general manager in 1985. In 1992, he became vice president of Sevel Argentina (then manufacturing Fiat and Peugeot automobiles under licence in Argentina as part of Socma), and became president two years later.

Macri was born in Tandil in the province of Buenos Aires, the son of Italian-born tycoon Francesco “Franco” Macri (owner of the Philco affiliate in Argentina) and Alicia Blanco-Villegas Cinque. The family moved to Buenos Aires a short time later, and kept their houses in Tandil as vacation properties. His father, and his uncle Jorge Blanco Villegas, influenced Macri to become a businessman, and Franco expected his son to succeed him as leader of his firms. Macri preferred his uncle’s company to constant scrutiny by his father. He was educated at Colegio Cardenal Newman, and received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina. At this time Macri became interested in neoliberalism and joined the now-defunct Union of the Democratic Centre and a think tank led by former minister Álvaro Alsogaray. In 1985, he briefly attended Columbia Business School, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Universidad del CEMA in Buenos Aires.

Macri intended to run for chairman of sports club Boca Juniors in 1991, but his father convinced him to keep working at Sevel. He tried to buy the Deportivo Español team, but could not get support from the team’s board of directors. Macri supported Boca Juniors, paying coach César Luis Menotti’s salary and buying players for the team (including forward Walter Perazzo). Franco, skeptical about his son’s prospects for success, later allowed him to run Boca Juniors. He instructed aide Orlando Salvestrini to work with Mauricio for two reasons: to help him and to monitor his activities. Mauricio met with former Boca Juniors chairmen Antonio Alegre and Carlos Heller, and tried to convince them to work with him; both rebuffed him. Macri later sought the support of other groups in Boca Juniors, eventually winning the team’s internal elections in 1995 with 7,058 votes.

In 1991, Macri was kidnapped for 12 days by officers of the Argentine Federal Police. Kept in a small room with a chemical toilet and a hole in the roof to receive food, he was freed when his family reportedly paid a multimillion-dollar ransom. Macri has said that the ordeal led him to enter politics.

His first wife was Ivonne Bordeu, daughter of race-car driver Juan Manuel Bordeu. They had three sons: Agustina, Jimena and Francisco. After they divorced, Macri married model Isabel Menditeguy in 1994; Franco requested a prenuptial agreement. Although the marriage reached a crisis when Macri became chairman of Boca Juniors, they did not divorce until 2005. He began a romance with María Laura Groba which did not lead to marriage. Macri left Groba in 2010, began a relationship with businesswoman Juliana Awada and married Awada that year. At the wedding reception, he wore a fake moustache as part of his impersonation of singer Freddie Mercury. Macri accidentally swallowed the moustache, and Minister of Health Jorge Lemus performed first aid to save his life.

Born in Tandil, Buenos Aires Province, Macri is the son of Franco Macri, a prominent Italian businessman in the industrial and construction sectors, and was raised in an upper class home. He received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the Pontifical Catholic University of Argentina and studied at Columbia University’s business school in New York City, United States. Macri became president of Boca Juniors, one of Argentina’s two most popular football clubs, in 1995. In 2005, he created the centre-right Republican Proposal party (Propuesta Republicana, also known as PRO).

Prices for public utilities, such as electricity, gas and water, were fixed in 2002 by president Eduardo Duhalde during the 1998–2002 Argentine great depression. The Kirchners kept them fixed, and the state subsidized them to compensate for inflation, which rose by nearly 700 percent during their government. Investment in the utility sectors decreased, and generation and distribution networks deteriorated. Argentina lost its self-sufficiency, and went from an energy exporter to an importer. The cost of energy imports increased the trade deficit and the inflation rate, and power outages became frequent. The Kirchners left the grid on the brink of collapse, while their lavish subsidies were a large factor in the fiscal deficit that harmed the overall economy.

Macri entered politics in 2003, founding the centre-right party Commitment to Change (Spanish: Compromiso para el Cambio). The party was intended to be a source of new politicians, since the major parties were discredited after the December 2001 riots. Later that year, Macri ran for mayor of Buenos Aires, alongside Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. Although he won the first round of the election with 37 percent of the vote, he lost the runoff election with 46 percent of the vote going to sitting mayor Aníbal Ibarra, who was re-elected. In 2005, Macri joined Ricardo López Murphy of Recrear in a political coalition, the Republican Proposal (PRO), and was elected to the Chamber of Deputies with 33.9 percent of the vote. His campaigns were managed by Jaime Durán Barba. According to a 2007 report, Macri had participated in only 44 of 321 votings; he countered that he had become disappointed with Congress, since bills sent by the president were not open to debate or amendment. Ibarra was impeached and removed from office in 2006 as a result of the República Cromañón nightclub fire, and his term was completed by vice-chief of government Jorge Telerman.

During 2006, Macri worked both on his political activities as deputy and with his presidency of Boca Juniors. Before the 2007 general elections, he negotiated with the likely presidential candidate Jorge Sobisch, the governor of Neuquén Province, to create a national right-wing political coalition. This conflicted with Macri’s alliance with Ricardo López Murphy, who also intended to run for president and had denounced Sobisch for corruption. Later that year, Sobisch’s image was severely tarnished when teacher Carlos Fuentealba was killed during a union demonstration in Neuquén. He immediately backed out of his pact with Sobisch and remained neutral during the national election, which was won by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of the Front for Victory (FPV).

In February 2007, Macri announced that he would run again for mayor of Buenos Aires, heading the PRO slate with Gabriela Michetti. In the 2 June 2007 first round, he received 45.6 percent of the vote and defeated government-backed Daniel Filmus (who received 23.8 percent of the vote); incumbent Jorge Telerman finished third. In the 24 June runoff election, Macri defeated Filmus with 60.96 percent of the vote.

Buenos Aires, initially a federal district with limited autonomy, had become an autonomous city with the 1994 amendment of the Constitution of Argentina. The Argentine Federal Police, under national-government jurisdiction, still worked in the city and disputes over a potential transfer to a local force were unresolved when Macri was elected. He unsuccessfully tried to negotiate a transfer with President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. As an alternative, in 2008 Macri proposed a bill for the creation of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Police to work with federal police in the city. The bill, supported by the PRO and the Kirchnerite blocs, was rejected by Civic Coalition blocs and those aligned with Ibarra. Elisa Carrió, leader of the Civic Coalition, thought that Macri had abandoned the transfer request, and Ibarra said that the forces’ duties would overlap. The Metropolitan Police began with nearly 1,000 officers; the Federal Police had 17,000 officers working in the city. As a result, the metropolitan police worked on a small scale during the transition and more complex tasks were reserved for the federal police.

For the 2009 midterm elections, he allied with Francisco de Narváez and Felipe Solá. The alliance was successful; De Narvaez defeated former president Néstor Kirchner in Buenos Aires Province and Gabriela Michetti won the city election. With this defeat, the Kirchners lost their majority in both chambers of the Congress. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, whose public image was good after the death and state funeral of Néstor Kirchner in late 2010, ran for re-election. Macri, who was considered a likely candidate for the opposition, ran for re-election as mayor instead. He won the first round on 10 July 2011 with 47.08 percent of the vote against Filmus’s 27.78 percent, and then the 31 July runoff against Filmus with 64.25 percent of the vote.

A gay couple, José María Di Bello and Alex Freyre, started a judicial case so that they could get married in Buenos Aires. They challenged articles 172 and 188 of the civil code, which restrict marriage to people of different genders, as unconstitutional. Judge Gabriela Seijas agreed, and the couple married in 2009. It was the first same-sex marriage in Argentina. Macri did not appeal the ruling, saying that same-sex marriage was becoming universally accepted and individuals had a right to happiness. He compared the controversy with the sanctioning of divorce during the 1980s after the restoration of democracy in Argentina; highly controversial at first, it was eventually accepted. A federal law permitting same-sex marriage was passed the following year.

Sergio Burstein was the leader of a group of people whose relatives died in the AMIA bombing. Macri was charged in a 2010 wiretapping case, suspected of spying on Burstein and his brother-in-law Néstor Daniel Leonardo. Macri denied the charges. Judge Norberto Oyarbide indicted him, and Federal Chamber members Eduardo Farah, Eduardo Freiler and Jorge Ballestero confirmed the indictment. It was suspected at the time that Macri had organized a clandestine spy network with the aid of Jorge Alberto Palacios and Ciro James. The case was transferred to judge Sebastián Casanello, who ordered further investigation. It was learned that Macri had little knowledge about Palacios’ daily activities and his minister, Mariano Narodowski, had appointed James. Franco Macri, the president’s father, admitted to hiring private agencies to spy on Daniel Leonardo.

Although Macri was a potential presidential candidate in the 2011 general elections, he ran instead for re-election as mayor. He received about 47 percent of the vote in the mayoral election, which led to a runoff election on 31 July 2011 against Daniel Filmus in which Macri was re-elected for a second consecutive term. On 22 November 2015, after a tie in the first round of the presidential elections on 25 October, he received 51.34 percent of the vote to defeat Front for Victory candidate Daniel Scioli and was inaugurated on 10 December 2015 in the Argentine Congress.

The Buenos Aires Underground, initially maintained by the national government, was the subject of a year-long dispute between him and the Fernández de Kirchner government. The national government sought to transfer it to the city, which Macri supported, but the budget and length of the transition period were contested. Macri announced that the city would take over the underground on 13 November 2012. Line A, which was using wooden cars almost a century old, received a fleet of modern cars from the national government; Line H also received new cars. Madrid Metro rolling-stock purchases for Line B were criticised, despite their technical superiority, for having a limited compatibility with the line and costing more than new trains for the city’s commuter-rail network.

He criticized Scioli for negative campaigning by the FPV. Several politicians and FPV institutions had issued warnings about what might happen if Macri were elected president. According to Scioli, the campaign was intended to encourage public awareness. It was rumored that the campaign might have been suggested by Brazilian political consultant João Santana, who had organized a similar campaign in Brazil during the ballotage of Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves in the 2014 Brazilian general election.

Macri ran for president of Argentina in 2015. With President Cristina Kirchner unable to run, early opinion polls indicated a close three-way race between Macri, Kirchnerite governor Daniel Scioli and Tigre mayor Sergio Massa. Other minor parties, such as the Radical Civic Union (UCR), the Civic Coalition (CC) and some socialist parties, made a political coalition, the Broad Front UNEN. This coalition disbanded before the elections, and the UCR and CC made a coalition with the PRO, named Cambiemos (English: Let’s change). Macri supported Horacio Rodríguez Larreta against Gabriela Michetti in the PRO primary elections for mayor of Buenos Aires. Larreta won the primary and general elections, and Michetti was selected as Macri’s vice-presidential candidate. María Eugenia Vidal, Macri’s deputy mayor, ran on the Cambiemos ticket for governor of Buenos Aires Province, a populous province which was strategic to the elections. Macri and Massa negotiated a coalition against Kirchnerism, which would have seen Massa withdraw from the presidential race to run for governor of Buenos Aires on the Cambiemos ticket. Macri declined this proposal, kept Vidal as the party’s candidate for governor, and Massa ran for president with his own party.

Macri announced his cabinet on 25 November 2015, about two weeks before he was due to take office. The presidential transition was difficult. Macri and Kirchner met briefly; she provided no help to the new administration, and spoke only about the inauguration ceremony. They disagreed about its location; Kirchner wanted it to take place at the Palace of the Argentine National Congress, and Macri favoured the White Hall of the Casa Rosada. Plans for violence against Macri supporters near the Plaza during the inauguration were rumoured, and it was unclear who would control the police during the ceremony. Judge María Servini de Cubría ruled that Kirchner’s term of office ended at midnight on the morning of 10 December, and provisional Senate president Federico Pinedo was in charge of the executive branch for the 12 hours between the end of Kirchner’s term and Macri’s swearing-in. Kirchner left Buenos Aires that day to attend the inauguration of sister-in-law Alicia Kirchner as governor of Santa Cruz Province.

Although Casanello dismissed the charges in 2015, Leonardo appealed the ruling; the dismissal was upheld several months later in federal court. Farah, Freiler and Ballestero voted for acquittal; others involved in the case, including Palacios, are still under investigation.

Gerardo Morales of the UCR was elected governor of Jujuy Province in the 2015 elections. Although the UCR was part of Cambiemos in federal politics, it was allied with Sergio Massa in the province. Morales was the first non-Peronist governor in the province since 1983. He opposed activist Milagro Sala, accusing her of leading a government parallel to that of Eduardo Fellner. According to Morales, Sala led a violent and coercive group and children were forced to join her party to attend school. When he was elected governor, Morales ordered all organizations to operate though banks instead of on a cash basis to retain their legal standing. Sala began a protest in front of the government plaza, but most of her supporters accepted Morales’s edict. Prosecutor Viviana Montiel asked local judge Raúl Gutiérrez to order Sala’s arrest for causing a disturbance and encouraging crime. Gutiérrez agreed, and Sala was arrested on 16 January 2016.

In 2016, Macri was named one of the world’s 100 most influential people and the most powerful president in Latin America by US news magazine Time.

Macri wanted to negotiate with holdouts and end the default to return to the international capital markets and strengthen the national economy. Argentina offered to pay $6.5 billion to settle lawsuits on 5 February 2016, requesting that the prior ruling on its payments be lifted. Although Cambiemos did not have a majority in either house of Congress, the bill was approved in March and Argentina faced a court hearing in New York on 13 April. The court upheld judge Thomas P. Griesa’s ruling, allowing Argentina to pay the 2005 and 2010 bondholders to whom it was still in default. The payment, made with a bond sale, was reportedly the end of the Argentine default, which had begun in 2001.

On 19 January 2016, Macri attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with opposition figure Sergio Massa and part of his cabinet, in a search for investors. He was one of the best-known figures at the meeting, along with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and US vice president Joe Biden. It was the first time since 2003 that Argentina had participated in the forum.

During Macri’s first year, economic recovery was slow. Unemployment and inflation remained high and growth did not come as expected. Kirchner’s Careful Pricing price-control program, which benefited small and medium-sized enterprises, was kept with a revision of its included products. The government began several public-works projects to stimulate the economy and help the construction sector. Political intervention in the INDEC figures ended, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) declared in November 2016 that Argentine statistics were again in accordance with international standards. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimated that Argentina would emerge from recession in 2017 or 2018, and lowered its country risk classification from seven points to six.

In 2016, Minister Juan José Aranguren arranged the removal of state subsidies for electricity, gas and water, which caused a huge increase in prices for those utilities. The increases were met with protests in several cities. Because mandatory public hearings had not been held on the price increases, these were annulled by the courts. The Supreme Court upheld a temporary halt of the price increase for residential customers in September 2016.

Macri also shifted Argentina’s relations with the United States. During a visit in 2016, president Barack Obama praised him: “I’m impressed because he has moved rapidly on so many of the reforms that he promised, to create more sustainable and inclusive economic growth, to reconnect Argentina with the global economy and the world community”. Obama announced that the US would declassify its military and intelligence records of the 1970s Dirty War. Foreign Minister Susana Malcorra supported Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election, which was won by Republican Donald Trump. Macri forged diplomatic relations with Trump and brought in measures likened to Trump’s border policies, including tightening control of immigration, limiting the entry of convicted criminals and facilitating the deportation of foreigners who commit crimes. In 2019, Trump declassified more than 5,600 US documents about the Dirty War.

Macri changed Argentina’s position on conflicts in the Middle East. During Macri’s first week in office, he voided the memorandum of understanding between Argentina and Iran, which would have established a joint investigation of the 1994 AMIA bombing, a terrorist attack on a Jewish organization for which Argentina had blamed Hezbollah and Iran. The memorandum had been ruled unconstitutional by the judiciary, a ruling which was appealed during Kirchner’s presidency. Macri withdrew the appeal, upholding the original ruling. He distanced himself from Iran and encouraged continued investigations of the AMIA bombing and the death of Alberto Nisman, a prosecutor investigating the case. Those cases and Nisman’s probe of Kirchner have special importance for Argentina–Israel relations, and ambassador Carlos Faustino García and Israeli diplomat Modi Efraim praised Macri for encouraging the investigations. In July 2016, it was announced that Argentina would grant asylum to 3,000 refugees of the Syrian Civil War.

In 2016, the Panama Papers were leaked, comprising 11.5 million documents detailing offshore entities owned by people from many countries. Macri was listed as a director of Fleg Trading from 1998 to 2009. He did not declare his involvement in 2007, when he became mayor, or in 2015, when he became president. Prosecutor Federico Delgado asked the judiciary to determine if Macri “maliciously failed to complete his tax declaration”. Macri argued that he did not report his involvement because he was not a stakeholder and did not receive money from it. The company was established by his father to run a failed Brazilian business. Macri owns other foreign accounts with properly-disclosed transactions, and said that he would file a judicial “declaration of certainty” to affirm his statements. A similar company, Kagemusha, was discovered several months later. It was established in 1981 by Franco Macri, with his then-22-year-old son as its vice president.

The 2017 Argentine legislative election renewed a third of the seats in the Senate and half in the chamber of deputies. The election was considered a referendum on the presidency of Macri up to that point. Kirchner, leader of the opposition, ran for senator for the populous Buenos Aires province. She left the PJ to avoid the primary elections and created a new party, Citizen’s Unity. Esteban Bullrich, minister of education, was the candidate of Cambiemos in the district. Kirchner and Bullrich had a close tie in the primary election, and Kirchner prevailed by just 0.21 percent of the vote.

On 20 September 2017, civil judge Andrés Fraga determined that, in Fleg Trading Ltd, Mauricio Macri accepted the position of director for the sole and only effect of designating a replacement and resigning, and that in Kagemusha he did not even tacitly accept the position of director for which he was appointed by Franco Macri. The ruling added that he was not a shareholder in either of the two companies, that he did not receive any dividends or profits, did not participate in the business decisions, nor was he the owner or co-owner of any current bank account of the companies.

Argentina and Venezuela had troubled relations at the time. The 2017 Venezuelan Constituent Assembly election was considered illegal by Argentina, which does not acknowledge the legislative body established by it. Macri also removed the Order of the Liberator General San Martín award from Maduro. Argentina signed the Declaration of Lima, which established the Lima Group, a supranational body of countries that consider Venezuela to be under a dictatorship and want to restore its democracy. Maduro was re-elected in the 2018 Venezuelan presidential election and took office for a new term on 10 January 2019. This started the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis, as many countries believed that Maduro had committed electoral fraud. Argentina and Brazil, under the newly elected Jair Bolsonaro, refused to acknowledge Maduro as a legitimate ruler. They instead acknowledged Juan Guaidó, who was appointed president of Venezuela by the National Assembly.

In the international arena, the country left the pink tide and was a vocal critic of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro during the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis. The party won the most districts during the 2017 midterm elections, and Macri announced that he would run for a second term in 2019. He secured his party’s nomination in the 2019 Presidential election in August 2019 despite a poor performance in the primary.

On August 11, 2019, Macri scored the primary election which gave him renomination as his party’s candidate in the 2019 Argentine Presidential election. He was renominated, but scored only 32%, compared to 47% to populist Alberto Fernández and his running mate, Cristina Kirchner, in their primary for Frente de Todos.