CFK was the first woman elected to preside over the country and now faces controversial legal problems
The two-time president of Argentina Cristina Fernández, who this Thursday was the victim of a firearm attack near her home amid growing political tension, has been the most powerful political figure of the last fifteen years in the South American country.
Cunning, controversial, eloquent, strategist. The first woman elected by popular vote to command the Casa Rosada is part of that select list of public figures in Argentina capable of arousing both love and hate. And it is that the figure of Fernández has never gone unnoticed, since her beginnings in the political arena just over thirty years ago.
Born on February 19, 1953 in the Buenos Aires city of La Plata, CFK, as it is called in Argentina, met Nestor Kirchner at the university, where they were studying law, and, after six months of courtship, she married him in 1975, when both flirted with militancy in the Peronist Youth. After the 1976 coup d’état, which began the military dictatorship, the couple settled in the southern Río Gallegos, Kirchner’s hometown and where he founded a political career that led him to the Argentine Presidency in May 2003. They had two children, Máximo, 45, currently a deputy, and Florencia, 32.
Fernández’s political career began in the late 1980s, when she was elected provincial deputy in Santa Cruz, a post she left six years later to sit in the Senate. In 1997 she became a national deputy and in 2001 she returned to the Senate and was re-elected in 2005, already as first lady. In 2007, he succeeded Kirchner as President, who died for a heart attack in 2010, perhaps the hardest blow of his life and with which he had to bear in the 2011 campaign for elections that gave him re-election and in which he obtained 54% of the votes, the highest level of Popular support achieved in presidential elections since Argentina’s return to democracy in 1983.
political protagonism
With a worn out political and economic model, Kirchnerism, without its own alternative to the “heavyweight” that Cristina represented, lost the presidential 2015 and had to leave the Casa Rosada to the conservative Mauricio Macri. Two years later, Fernández, whose problems with the Justice had begun towards the end of his second term, obtained a seat in the Senate in mid-term elections. Since then, he has been in the spotlight for alleged corruption scandalsbut when many predicted that her influence would be diluted in the labyrinths of the courts, her political acumen launched her once again to the heights of political power.
It was in May 2019 when, after months without revealing whether or not he would bet on seeking a third term, he surprised and shook the political hornet’s nest by offering Alberto Fernández, chief of staff for five of the twelve years of Kirchnerism in power, to lead him the presidential formula that would compete in the elections that year. With CFK as a candidate for vice president, the duo smoothed out the notorious rough edges that they had once had between each other and knew how to bring together the different currents of Peronism, a unity that was key to snatching Macri’s re-election dreams from him.
That masterful move allowed her, as vice president, to access the Senate from December 10, 2019, a privileged place from which to continue weaving her political strategy, not always aligned with the interests of Alberto Fernández, with whom she maintains public and growing differences since September 2021, exposing the ruling front -and the country- to successive tensions.
court saga
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The oral trial that Fernández has been facing since 2019 and that has already entered its final stage focuses on one of the dozen cases that have been opened against him for alleged irregularities during his tenure. The vice president is awaiting the initiation of another oral proceeding against her, but she has already been dismissed in several other cases in which she was investigated.
Fernández, who in recent years has avoided the orders for preventive detention issued against her thanks to the privileges that protect her, has always defended her innocence and has claimed to be the target of political persecution. In case of being convicted, the 69-year-old vice president, who in principle enjoys privileges until December 2023, has the right to appeal the sentence before higher courts.