Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner (born Cristina Elisabet Fernández, 19 February 1953), often referred to by her initials CFK, is an Argentine lawyer and politician who served as president of Argentina from 2007 to 2015 and later as vice president from 2019 to 2023, as well as first lady of Argentina during the tenure of her husband, Néstor Kirchner, from 2003 to 2007. She was the second female president of Argentina (after Isabel Perón) and the first elected female president of Argentina. Ideologically, she identifies herself as a Peronist and a progressive, with her political approach called Kirchnerism.
Born in La Plata, Buenos Aires Province, she studied law in La Plata, where she met and married Néstor Kirchner, and moved to Patagonia with him upon graduation. She was elected to the provincial legislature while her husband was elected mayor of Río Gallegos. While her husband was elected governor of Santa Cruz Province, she was elected national senator in 1995, and had a controversial tenure, after in 1994 having also been elected to the constituent assembly that amended the Constitution of Argentina.
At the end of his tenure as president, Néstor Kirchner did not run for reelection. Instead, his wife was the candidate for the Front for Victory alliance, becoming president in the 2007 presidential election. Her first term of office started with a conflict with the agricultural sector, and the protracted treatment of the proposed taxation in Congress ended with it being rejected after a tie-breaking vote was cast by her own vice president Julio Cobos. After this, she nationalised private pension funds, and fired the president of the Central Bank. The price of public services remained subsidised and she renationalized energy firm YPF (which hae been privatized under Carlos Menem) as a result. She also continued her husband's human rights policies, though she also had a rocky relationship with the press. Néstor Kirchner died in 2010, and she was re-elected for a second term in 2011 with 54.1% of the votes, the highest percentage obtained by any presidential candidate since 1983, and the 37.3% difference of votes between her and runner-up Hermes Binner being the second largest in the history of Argentine general elections. During her second term, she established currency controls, and the country fell into sovereign default in 2014. Term-limited for the 2015 elections, her party selected governor of Buenos Aires Province (and vice president under her husband's presidency) Daniel Scioli, but he was defeated by Mauricio Macri.
During her two terms as president, several corruption scandals took place and subsequently her government faced several demonstrations against her presidency. In 2015, she was indicted for obstructing the investigation into the 1994 AMIA Bombing, after Alberto Nisman's controversial accusation of a purported "pact" (a memorandum of understanding) signed between her government and Iran which was supposedly seeking impunity for Iranians involved in the terrorist attack. In 2017, an arrest warrant was issued for Fernández de Kirchner charging her with "treason", but due to her parliamentary immunity (she was elected senator in the meantime) she did not go to prison, and the treason accusation was later dropped, while other charges related to Nisman's accusation remained. In 2018, she was also indicted for corruption on charges alleging that her administration had accepted bribes in exchange for public works contracts. On 30 September 2020, a federal criminal cassation court confirmed the corruption trials of Fernández de Kirchner, ruling the former president's objections to be inadmissible. After analyzing the claims of the defendants in the case for the never-ratified memorandum with Iran, on 7 October 2021, a federal oral court declared the case null and void, with the judges concluding that there was no crime in the signing of the agreement with Iran, and declared a judicial dismissal of Kirchner and the other defendants. On 6 December 2022, she was sentenced to six years in prison and a lifetime ban from holding public office for corruption, a verdict she stated she would appeal.
Works featuring her:
- She is one of the many Argentine politicians parodied on Argentine variety show ShowMatch.
