Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner succeeded her husband as president, was re-elected by the widest margin in fifty years, and left office with the country in currency controls and herself under indictment. She was a lawyer from La Plata, a senator for two decades and a formidable parliamentarian in her own right before her husband's presidency, and she followed him into the office in 2007 in an arrangement that was understood to be an alternation rather than a succession. He died in 2010, which ended the plan and made her the sole figure of the movement; in 2011 she was re-elected with fifty-four per cent. Her governments continued the settlement that had followed the collapse of 2001: heavy social spending, universal child allowances that measurably cut poverty, export taxes on the soya boom to pay for them, and a series of renationalisations including the oil company and the private pension funds. When the commodity cycle turned the arithmetic stopped working. Inflation ran above twenty per cent while the statistics agency was instructed to report less, which cost the country its credibility with everyone including its own citizens; currency controls produced a parallel exchange rate and a black market; and a decade-long fight with holdout creditors from the 2001 default ended in a New York court order that put Argentina into technical default again in 2014. The political conflicts were as sharp. A 2008 attempt to raise export duties brought a four-month farmers' revolt and was defeated by her own vice president's casting vote in the Senate. A media law aimed at breaking up the largest press group ran for years through the courts. In 2015 the prosecutor investigating her government's handling of the inquiry into the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community centre was found dead in his apartment days before he was to testify, which has never been resolved. She left office that December, returned as vice president in 2019, and was convicted of fraud in a public works case in 2022, a verdict she is appealing.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Argentine
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
