Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

Disclaimer: This post does not necessarily reflect my political preference.

It looks much like the Clintons. Bill Clinton president and now Hillary Clinton running for president of the US. In Argentina there is something similar going on. Néstor Kirchner is the current president of La República Argentina and his wife and First Lady Cristina is going to run for president in October 2007.

So who is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner?

Cristina Elisabeth Fernández (born 19 February 1953) is a politician from La Plata, capital of the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is a Senator for Buenos Aires Province and the Argentine First Lady. She was officially confirmed as the ruling Front for Victory's candidate for the presidency of Argentina in the general election scheduled for 28 October 2007. If elected , Cristina Kirchner would become Argentina's first elected woman president but not the first to run the country. She would also be the first presidential spouse to be elected president in Argentina's history.

Fernández studied and graduated as a lawyer at the School of Legal and Social Sciences of the University of La Plata in the 1970s. She married a fellow university student, Néstor Kirchner, the current president of Argentina, politically active in her same party, on 9 March 1975. Together they moved to the province of Santa Cruz, where they engaged in the private practice of their profession. They have two children, named Máximo and Florencia.

Fernández started her political career in the Tendencia Revolucionaria faction of the Justicialist Party in the 1970s, and was elected provincial representative of Santa Cruz in 1989 and subsequently re-elected in 1993.

In 1995 she was elected to represent Santa Cruz in the Senate and in 1997 in the Chamber of Deputies. In 2001 she won again a seat in the Senate.

Fernández provided the main backbone to her husband's successful campaign for the presidency of Argentina in 2003, against two other Justicialist candidates and several other competitors. As First Lady, she has become an itinerant ambassador for her husband's government. Her highly combative speech style polarises Argentine politics (recalling the style of Eva Perón) but seems to be appreciated by a large part of society, mainly in the lower classes.

She was the main candidate for Senator of the Front for Victory faction of her party in the province of Buenos Aires, for the 23 October 2005 elections, in a heated campaign directed mainly against Hilda González de Duhalde, the wife of former interim president Eduardo Duhalde. Her list won the elections by a 25% margin over González.

With the October 2007 elections approaching, Fernández de Kirchner began to receive repeated indirect support from members of her party as a prospective presidential candidate. Some political analysts hypothesized that Néstor Kirchner could forego reelection and support his wife, who could do the same for him after her term, thus solving the lame duck problem. Surveys showed that the First Lady would win the presidential election by a wide margin over all other representative candidates (except her husband himself). On 1 July 2007, Chief of Cabinet Alberto Fernández (who often acts as a spokesperson for the presidency) told the press that Fernández de Kirchner would indeed be the presidential candidate, and that her campaign would be officially launched on 19 July. Four opinion polls published by Clarin on Sunday July 1 showed Kirchner's wife likely to win in a first round of balloting, with around 46 percent support and a more than 30 percentage point lead over two other leading presidential contenders.