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Argentine first lady claims win

Cristina Fernandez will succeed her husband as president, exit polls show.

By Washington Post
Published October 29, 2007

BUENOS AIRES - The presidency of Argentina was handed from husband to wife Sunday, as first lady Cristina Fernandez crushed 13 opposition candidates on the promise of adhering to the political principles that made President Nestor Kirchner one of Latin America's most popular leaders.

Multiple exit polls released after Sunday's election indicated that she had received about 46 percent of the vote, enough to outdistance her nearest rival by about 20 percentage points and thereby avoid a runoff. The victory makes her the second woman to be elected president in South America in the past two years, after Chile's Michelle Bachelet.

"We have won amply," Fernandez proclaimed Sunday night.

Her husband is credited with Argentina's rebound from a 2001 economic collapse, and much of her support is due to his popularity. She has been compared to U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is seeking to become president of the United States after husband Bill Clinton won the office.

Fernandez, 54, was a nationally recognized senator before her husband was elected president in 2003. But she pegged her presidential campaign to the successes of his term, in which there were four years of strong economic growth following the economic collapse and $100-billion debt default. She offered few concrete proposals during the electoral race but promised to "deepen the change" that her husband's government instituted.

Like her husband, Fernandez is a fiery and often combative orator whose politics are rooted in the brand of populism made famous here by former President Juan Peron and his wife, Eva.

Kirchner's government steered the country away from the free-market policies of the 1990s that the couple - along with a large percentage of the population - blame for the economic crisis. Fernandez has vowed to remain defiantly opposed to the advice of global lending institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

To her supporters, such declarations of economic independence - together with a long history of holding Argentina's 1976-83 military dictatorship responsible for human rights abuses - count as the couple's principle strengths. Fernandez's campaign literature drew parallels between her and Eva Peron, who is revered here as a champion of social justice and defender of the poor.

"Cristina will lead a government that represents all of the people, but the rest of the candidates want to govern just for the elites," said Nestor Arevalo, 38, who cast a ballot for Fernandez in the province of Buenos Aires on Sunday. "She has proven herself to be a fighter for human rights."

Raised in the provincial city of La Plata, she was a student activist in the 1970s who supported the Peronist party and opposed a military dictatorship that had no tolerance for dissent. She met her husband while in law school there, and after the two moved together to the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, they formed an alliance that soon dominated the region's political landscape. He was elected the province's governor, and she became its senator. After he was elected president, she won a third term in the Senate in 2005, this time representing the province of Buenos Aires, the country's largest.

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

[Last modified October 29, 2007, 01:10:02]