Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

Biography

Cristina Fernandez was born in La Plata in 1953 and studied law at the National University of La Plata, where she met Nestor Kirchner, whom she married. The couple moved to his home city of Rio Gallegos in Santa Cruz, where she joined his law firm in 1979 and she was elected to the provincial legislature in 1989 while he rose to mayor and governor.

Elected a national senator for Santa Cruz in 1995, she was a member of the 1994 convention that amended the constitution, and later served as a deputy and again as senator, including for Buenos Aires Province. During her husband's presidency from 2003 to 2007 she was First Lady.

She won the presidency for the Front for Victory in 2007, becoming Argentina's first directly elected woman president, and was re-elected in 2011 with 54 percent of the vote. Her governments clashed with farmers over export taxes in 2008, nationalised private pensions and the oil company YPF, imposed currency controls, and saw a sovereign default in 2014 and a series of corruption allegations.

She returned as vice president under Alberto Fernandez from 2019 to 2023 and survived an assassination attempt in 2022. Convicted of corruption in the road works case and banned from office, she saw the verdict upheld by the Supreme Court in 2025.