Cristina Fernández de Kirchner
President Obama’s Bilateral Meeting with President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina
The President holds a bilateral meeting with President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina around the G20 Summit in Cannes.
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner – President of Argentina
Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner (Spanish pronunciation: [kɾisˈtina eˈlisaβet ferˈnandes ðe ˈkiɾʃneɾ] (
listen); born 19 February 1953), known as Cristina Kirchner orCFK, is the 55th and current President of Argentina and widow of former President Néstor Kirchner. She is Argentina’s first elected female president, the second woman to hold the position (after Isabel Martínez de Perón, 1974–1976) and the first woman re-elected. A Justicialist, Fernández served one term as National Deputy and three terms as National Senator for both Santa Cruz and Buenos Aires provinces.
A native of La Plata, Buenos Aires, Fernández is a graduate of the National University of La Plata. She met her husband during her studies, and they moved to Santa Cruz to work as lawyers. In May 1991, she was elected to the provincial legislature. Between 1995 and 2007, she was repeatedly elected to the Argentine National Congress, both as a National Deputy and National Senator. During Kirchner’s presidency (2003–2007) she acted as First Lady. Fernández was chosen as the Front for Victory presidential candidate in 2007.
In the October 2007 general election she obtained 45.3% of the vote and a 22% lead over her nearest rival, avoiding a runoff election. She was inaugurated on 10 December 2007, and was re-elected to a second term in the first round of the October 2011 general election, with 54.1% and 37.3% over the next candidate, Hermes Binner. Critics of Kirchner’s administration charged it with corruption, crony capitalism, falsification of public statistics, harassment of Argentina’s independent media and use of the tax agency as a censorship tool.
Personal life
Fernández was born in Ringuelet, a suburb west of La Plata, Buenos Aires Province. She is a daughter of Eduardo Fernández (of Spanish heritage), a bus driver, and Ofelia Esther Wilhelm (of German descent). She studied law at the National University of La Plata during the 1970s and became active in the Peronist Youth. In 1973, during her studies there, she met her future spouse, Néstor Kirchner. They were married on 9 May 1975, and had two children: Máximo (1977) and Florencia (1990). Néstor Kirchner died on 27 October 2010 after suffering a heart attack. On 27 December 2011, presidential spokesman Alfredo Scoccimarro announced that Fernández de Kirchner had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer on 22 December and that she would undergo surgery on 4 January 2012. However, it was later stated that she was misdiagnosed and does not have cancer.
Political career
Cristina Fernández during her youth
Along with Néstor Kirchner, Cristina sympathized with the Peronist Youth during her university studies. However, the two never joined Montoneros (a guerrilla organization with close ties to the Peronist Youth during the period 1970-1976), nor engaged in any notable political activism during that time. When Isabel Perón was deposed by the 1976 Argentine coup d’état, they left La Plata for Río Gallegos and worked as lawyers. Cristina began her political career in the late 1980s and was elected to the Santa Cruz Provincial Legislature in 1989, a position to which she was re-elected in 1993.
In 1995, Fernández was elected to represent Santa Cruz in the Senate. She was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1997 and returned to the Senate in 2001. Fernández helped with her husband’s successful campaign for the presidency in 2003, but without making joint public appearances. In the 27 April 2003 presidential election first round, former president Carlos Saúl Menem won the greatest number of votes (25%), but failed to get the votes necessary to win an overall majority. A second-round run-off vote between Menem and runner-up Néstor Kirchner was scheduled for 18 May. Feeling certain that he was about to face a sound electoral defeat, Menem decided to withdraw his candidacy, thus automatically making Kirchner the new president, with 22% of the votes. This was the lowest number in the history of the country.
During her husband’s term, Fernández de Kirchner was First Lady of the country. In that role, she worked as an itinerant ambassador for his government. Her highly combative speech style polarized Argentine politics, recalling the style of Eva Perón. Although she repeatedly rejected the comparison later, Fernández de Kirchner once said in an interview that she identified herself “with the Evita of the hair in a bun and the clenched fist before a microphone” (the typical image of Eva Perón during public speeches) more than with the “miraculous Eva” of her mother’s time, who had come “to bring work and the right to vote for women.”
At the October 2005 legislative elections, Fernández de Kirchner was her party‘s main candidate for Senator in the Province of Buenos Aires district. She ran a heated campaign against Hilda González de Duhalde, wife of former president Eduardo Duhalde. Fernández won the elections with 45.77% of the vote, followed by González de Duhalde with 20.43%.
Election to presidency of Argentina – Argentine general election, 2007
Cristina Fernández campaigns with her husband, then-President Néstor Kirchner (outgoing), and their respective running mates.
With Fernández leading all the pre-election polls by a wide margin, her challengers were trying to force her into a run-off. She needed either more than 45% of the vote, or 40% of the vote and a lead of more than 10% over her nearest rival, to win outright. She won the election in the first round with 45.3% of the vote, followed by 22% for Elisa Carrió(candidate for the Civic Coalition) and 16% for former Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna. Eleven other candidates split the remaining 15%. Kirchner was popular among the suburban working class and the rural poor, while Carrió received more support from the urban middle class, as did Lavagna. However, Kirchner lost the election in the three largest cities (Buenos Aires, Córdoba and Rosario), although she won in most other places elsewhere, including the large provincial capitals such as Mendoza and Tucumán.
On 14 November, the president-elect publicly announced the names of her new cabinet, which was sworn in on 10 December. Of the 12 ministers appointed, seven were already ministers in Néstor Kirchner‘s government, while the other five took office for the first time. Three other ministries were created afterwards.
The president elect began a four-year term on 10 December 2007, facing challenges including inflation, union demands for higher salaries, private investment in key areas, lack of institutional credibility (exemplified by the controversy surrounding the national statistics bureau, INDEC), utility companies demanding authorization to raise their fees, low availability of cheap credit to the private sector, and the upcoming negotiation of the defaulted foreign debt with the Paris Club. Kirchner was the second female president of Argentina, after Isabel Martínez de Perón, but unlike Perón, Kirchner was the head of the ballot, whereas Isabel Perón was elected as vice president of Juan Domingo Perón and became president after his death. The transition from Néstor Kirchner to Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was also the first time when a democratic head of state was replaced by his spouse, without involving the death of any of them. Néstor Kirchner stayed active in politics despite not being the president, and worked alongside his wife, Cristina. The press developed the term “presidential marriage” to make reference to both of them at once. Some political analysts as Pablo Mendelevich compared this type of government with a diarchy.
