New Argentinian President Mauricio Macri Sworn In

Buenos Aires: Argentina’s new President Mauricio Macri met with governors on Saturday in another major change of tone from his predecessor Cristina Kirchner’s confrontational style.

“Not so quickly”, Macri shot back, to the laughter of onlookers in the elegant San Martín Palace. “Multiplying job opportunities is the only way to achieve prosperity where, today, there is an unacceptable level of poverty”, Macri told lawmakers moments after taking his oath in the National Assembly.

Macri is Argentina’s first non-Peronist president in more than a decade.

“To believe that relations with Great Britain are limited to the Malvinas issue is to say the least an “over simplification”. but this does not mean we have to cancel all dialogue with the United Kingdom”. Macri hopes to light a fire under exports by letting the overvalued peso currency weaken, and to settle a politically sensitive lawsuit filed by US hedge funds who are demanding full repayment of debt Argentina defaulted on in 2002.

The 56-year-old Macri set out his agenda for change: “This government will know how to defend freedom, which is essential for democracy”, he said.

Late on Wednesday, Ms Fernandez had bid farewell to supporters in an emotional speech, urging people to take to the streets if they felt betrayed by the new centre-right government. “Confrontation has taken us down the wrong paths”, he said, Insisting that Argentines could overcome the country’s political polarisation, he added: “If we Argentines dare to unite, we will be unstoppable”.

The tiff, which had many Argentines shaking their head in shame, ended on Tuesday when a top aide said the president simply wouldn’t attend.

“I will all the time be trustworthy with you”, Macri informed the nation.

Macri’s win in Argentina was followed by a resounding victory for the Venezuelan opposition in legislative elections, as well as the opening of impeachment proceedings against embattled Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

Given the recent expiration of a bond exchange clause, Macri “is in a position to offer the holdouts a much better deal than Fernandez could have done” just past year.

Throughout his marketing campaign, Macri argued that measured free-market reforms would overhaul the struggling financial system.

On Thursday, he inherited the country’s problems: Inflation around 30 percent, dangerously low foreign reserves for the third largest economy in Latin America and a long-time spat with a group of creditors in the USA that has kept Argentina on the margins of worldwide credit markets. On the black market, which was spawned by a myriad of currency controls installed by Fernandez, the currency trades at about 14.7 per dollar.

In her last weeks in office, Fernandez rushed dozens of bills through Congress, appointed ambassadors and many other public workers and cut some taxes on the provinces, which will all make Macri’s initial months more hard.