Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

Profile Overview

Cristina Elísabet Fernández de Kirchner (born 19 February 1953) is an Argentine lawyer and politician who served as the 55th President of Argentina from 2007 to 2015, and later as the 37th Vice President of Argentina under President Alberto Fernández from 2019 to 2023. The widow of Néstor Kirchner, she was also First Lady during his presidency from 2003 to 2007. She was the second female president of Argentina after Isabel Perón and the first to be directly elected to office. Ideologically self-identified as a Peronist and a progressive, her political approach is called Kirchnerism. Since 2024, she has been the president of the Justicialist Party.
Born in La Plata, Buenos Aires Province, she studied law at the National University of La Plata, and moved to Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, with her husband, Néstor Kirchner, upon graduation. She was elected to the provincial legislature, while her husband was elected mayor of Río Gallegos. She was elected national senator in 1995, and had a controversial tenure, while her husband was elected governor of Santa Cruz. In 1994, she was also elected to the constituent assembly that amended the Constitution of Argentina.
Néstor Kirchner did not run for re-election. Instead, she became 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 her proposed taxation system was rejected. After this she nationalized private pension funds, and fired the president of the Central Bank. The price of public services remained subsidized, and she renationalized energy firm YPF as a result. The country had good relations with other South American nations, and strained relations with the western bloc as part of the regional political movement known as pink tide. She also continued her husband's human rights policies, and had a rocky relationship with the press. Néstor Kirchner died in 2010, and she was re-elected for a second term in 2011. She won the 2011 general election with 54.11% of the votes, the highest percentage obtained by any presidential candidate since 1983. She established currency controls during her second term, and the country fell into sovereign default in 2014.
During her terms as president, several corruption scandals surfaced and her government subsequently faced several demonstrations. She was acquitted of charges related to fraudulent low price sales of dollar futures. In 2015, she was indicted for obstructing the investigation into the 1994 AMIA bombing after federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman filed a legal complaint, alleging that the Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2013 between Argentina and Iran secured impunity for Iranians involved in the terrorist attack. In 2017, an arrest warrant issued by Claudio Bonadio charged her with "treason". Due to her parliamentary immunity, 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 indicted for corruption over allegations that her administration had accepted bribes in exchange for public works contracts. In September 2020, the federal criminal cassation court confirmed the corruption trials of Fernández de Kirchner, ruling her objections inadmissible. In October 2021, the Federal Oral Court 8 ruled that no crime had been committed in the Iran-memorandum case, and dismissed the charges against Fernández de Kirchner. In December 2024, the Supreme Court affirmed a 2023 ruling that revoked the acquittal handed down by Court 8, and ordered Fernández to stand trial for this case. In December 2022, she was sentenced in the road infrastructure case to six years in prison and a lifetime ban from holding public office for corruption. The verdict was upheld by a federal appeals court in November 2024, and by the Supreme Court in June 2025.