Often compared to Hillary Clinton, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is favored to succeed her husband.
Cox News Service
Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007
By ANDREW MARRA
Cox News Service
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — The comparisons made between Hillary Clinton and Argentina’s first lady are obvious and endless, and maybe Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is starting to tire of them.
Argentina’s always-dapper primera dama — a sitting senator and favorite to win the nation’s presidency next month — has called her American counterpart an inspiration. Yet in recent interviews last month she has drawn a line in the sand.
“Hillary really acquired her national standing because her husband was president,” she told CNN en Espanol. “She didn’t have a political career beforehand, and that really isn’t my case.”
The first lady and senator, 54, is known for her elegant sense of fashion, her love of travel, her fiery speaking style and her occasionally controversial international shopping trips. She won office as a legislator long before her husband ran for president.
When President Nestor Kirchner, 57, announced in July that he would not seek a second term, it cleared the way for his wife to take center stage but raised questions about his motivations.
The prevailing theory is that the move is an attempt by Argentina’s preeminent power couple to sidestep a constitutional ban against serving more than two consecutive presidential terms.
If Kirchner’s wife wins this year, the theory goes, he could campaign to replace her in the following election, and they could continue alternating terms for years to come.
The couple’s many opponents – the fractured opposition consists of 13 minority-party candidates – are crying foul.
“The Kirchners profess to be defenders of democracy but there’s nothing more undemocratic than undermining the alternating of power,” said Esteban Bullrich, an Argentine congressman and vice presidential candidate.
With polls showing her victory in October increasingly probable, Argentina is finding itself facing the same questions about political dynasties that the United States has been debating for years, first with the Bushes and now with the prospect of another Clinton in the White House.
As a prominent sociologist asked recently in a Buenos Aires newspaper: “Will the presidential bedroom become the fourth branch of government?”
But the phenomenon is nothing new in Argentine politics.
The prospect of the Kirchners attempting to govern Argentina jointly has invited comparisons to former President Juan Peron and his wife Evita Peron, the power couple who transformed Argentine politics in the mid-20th century.
Evita never held public office, but Maria Estela Peron, Peron’s last wife, served as his vice president in the 1970s, then assumed the presidency when he died in 1974.
She was never elected, however. Fernandez, if she wins on Oct. 28, would be Argentina’s first elected woman president.
What separates the talk of political dynasties in the United States and Argentina is the firm grip on power held by Kirchner, Fernandez and their ruling Victory Front. There is no major opposition party to challenge them.
A poll released in late August showed that 49 percent of potential voters support Fernandez, a figure in line with other recent surveys. The next closest candidate, a former economy minister, received just 11 percent.
Kirchner’s interventionist economic policies are sometimes criticized and his government has been shaken by recent corruption scandals. Yet he is credited with helping to revive the country after the severe 2001-02 economic crisis and continues to enjoy considerable popularity.
Fernandez is campaigning on the promise of continued economic growth and is expected to keep up the same populist policies of her husband’s government.
“There’s no mystery, Argentines. It’s the economic model,” she said in her nationally televised campaign kickoff speech earlier this summer. “Argentines have seen their quality of life improve.”
This has not stopped her opponents from pressing the point.
“She would be chosen for being the wife of the president, not for her own qualifications,” Bullrich said.
Biographically, her similarities to Hillary Clinton are striking. Both are sitting senators. Both are married to men they met in law school. Both have been first lady. And both want to be president.
But as Fernandez points out, she was a successful politician before her husband’s presidency. By the time he was elected governor of the Santa Cruz province in southern Argentina in 1991, she had already been a provincial legislator for two years.
“She clearly does not want to be seen as the ‘wifey’ successor to her husband,” said Riordan Roett, director of Latin American studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. “Therefore, establishing herself as an independent politician is very important — at home as well as overseas.”
“The Kirchners are extraordinarily lucky in their populist appeal,” Roett said. “The economy may blow up in their face at some point, but it’s not going to happen before November.”
Andrew Marra is a Buenos Aires-based freelance journalist.