[1] Sabattini enrolled at the National University of Córdoba and graduated with a Medical Degree in 1919, becoming affiliated to the centrist Radical Civic Union (UCR) – the party in power in Argentina at the time.

He extended assistance to his province's needy and to small business, while prosecuting hitherto rampant graft and limiting the Catholic Church's input in school curricula, earning him the enmity of that influential institution.

Sabattini's electoral and judicial reforms, as well as Córdoba Province conservatives' unwillingness to participate in the prevailing system of "patriotic fraud," prevented the nation's ruling party (the Concordance) from seizing the Governorship.

Around 1952 he began a pragmatic alliance with other opposing groups, after the increasingly autocratic Perón's seizure of a number of critical newspapers and his detention of prominent opponents.

Following this, Sabattini allied himself with the moderately conservative Ricardo Balbín, whose mainstream UCR (the UCR-P) was defeated by the splinter UCRI's Arturo Frondizi when the exiled Perón endorsed him ahead of the February 1958 elections.