On Sunday October 28, 2007does exactly 15 years, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who already had experience as a deputy and senator, consecrated herself as president with the 45.29% of the votes. Nestor Kirchner had surprised by announcing that he would not run for re-election, and the Front for Victory was running for his first lady, in a plan of alternation that would be cut short by the death of the former president three years later, on March 27. October 2010.
If the presidency of Nestor Kirchner had been marked by the economic recovery of Argentina after the 2001 crisis, leveraged by a “decade won with a sustained increase in the prices of raw materials”, which allowed a certain redistribution of income, the first presidency of Cristina Kirchner leaned by social measures.
Economic growth justified at the same time a progressive growth of the state and spending. The current vice president nationalized private retirement funds in the National Social Security Administration (ANSES), and promoted the Universal Child Allowance. He returned to the nationalization of Aerolineas Argentinas (today highly deficient), and promoted the Audiovisual Communication Services Law, which today awaits a new version after its annulment decreed by Mauricio Macri.
Behind the confrontation with the field due to the increase in tariffs on exports, came the international financial crisis that also began in 2008. But Cristina Kirchner managed to overcome both obstacles and be re-elected in 2011 with 54.11% of the votesthe largest majority obtained by any candidate since the return of democracy in 1983.
But the bloodletting that began in 2008 would go downhill for its second cycle. The high deficit of public accounts (where social aid and energy subsidies still prevail) emptied the reserves at the same time as the monetary issue increased, promoting devaluation and inflation, in a spiral that has not been broken in the following decade.
In this sense, his second presidency is remembered for a series of mass protests against him: the most important occurred on November 12, 2012 as a result of restrictions on imports and the purchase of dollars. The nationalization of YPF and a conflict with the “vulture funds”led to the cessation of debt payments and the consequent closure of access to credit in international markets.
Constitutionally barred from standing in the 2015 elections, Cristina Kirchner received the blow when in January 2015 the death of the prosecutor was known Alberto Nisman (they found her body in the bathroom of her house with a shot to the head), four days after denouncing her for the alleged cover-up in the investigation of the AMIA attack.
The Front for Victory and CFK’s finger would indicate as a possible successor to Daniel Scioli, governor of the province of Buenos Aires and former vice president of Néstor Kirchner. But Mauricio Macri and the Cambiemos coalition would prevail that year at the polls, marking a stop to the Kirchnerist cycle. One they would follow years of judicial investigations for corruptionpushing her return to the political arena in 2017: despite the defeat against Esteban Bullrich, she was elected senator for the province of Buenos Aires
But the overwhelming victory for the ruling coalition would be the end of the macrista spring. The economic crisis that exploded in 2018 and was strengthened the following year, revived the candidacy of Cristina Kirchner for president. But the senator announced the formation of a new coalition, the Frente de Todos, and her place on the ticket as vice president, along with Alberto Fernandezthe former chief of staff who had broken with Kirchnerism and returned as a guarantor of the turn to the center and Peronist lateralism.
“After having been twice president of that country and the first woman elected as such… I am still more convinced that never that personal expectation or ambition must be subordinated to the general interest”, he said then in a video. The campaign was marked by the presentation of her memoirs, the book “Sinceramente” that became the axis of the campaign.
The Fernández y Fernández formula prevailed at the polls with the promise of “put Argentina on its feet”, but the Covid-19 pandemic first, and the impact of a recession and high inflation dragged on since 2018, turned the economic management of the Front of All into a failure that enhanced the signs of tension.
The defeat in the mid-term elections at the end of 2021, put the government on the verge of disintegration, with resignations and cabinet changes, a process that continues. But the trial for the Road Case (where the Prosecutor’s Office accuses the vice president of having led an association to defraud the State through the alleged routing of million-dollar road works contracts in the province of Santa Cruz) and the assassination attempt, forced a truce in the coalitionAt least in front of the media.
A silence that Cristina Kirchner interrupts with Twitter criticismnow for the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, while he evaluates the possibilities and scenarios ahead of the 2023 elections. A strategy that inescapably distances Kirchnerism from Alberto Fernández, and concentrates it on the fight for the province of Buenos Aires, where it is speculated that CFK will be a candidate again.
by RN
