Néstor Kirchner

**Néstor Carlos Kirchner**

Term of Office:	May 25, 2003–Present
Predecessor:	Eduardo Duhalde
Successor:	incumbent
Vice-president:	Daniel Scioli
Date of Birth:	February 25, 1950
Place of Birth:	Río Gallegos
Profession:	Lawyer
Political Party:	Justicialist (His party is really Frente Para la Victoria, mainly a group of Justicialists that separated from the Justicialist Party)

(born 25 February 1950) is the current President of Argentina. He was sworn in on May 25, 2003. A Justicialist with leftist leanings, Kirchner was governor of the province of Santa Cruz prior to being elected president.

Early years

Kirchner was born in Río Gallegos, in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz. His father, who was a post office official, was of Swiss descent; his mother, Marija Ostoić, born in southern Chile, was of Croatian background. He received his primary and secondary education at local public schools; he obtained his high-school diploma from the Colegio Nacional República de Guatemala.

Early on, Kirchner participated in the Movimiento Justicialista, first as a member of the Young Peronists, whose left-wing radicalism was strongly opposed to the military dictatorships. In the mid-1970s, Kirchner studied law at La Plata National University, receiving his law degree in 1976. He returned to Río Gallegos with his wife, Cristina Fernández, also a lawyer and member of the Justicialist Party (Partido Justicialista, PJ), to practice law. During the dictatorial National Reorganization Process under Videla, he was incarcerated at one point, the reason for and duration of which is not known.

After the downfall of the military dictatorship and restoration of democracy in 1983, Kirchner became a public officer in the provincial government. The following year, he was briefly president of the Río Gallegos social welfare fund, but was forced out by the governor because of a dispute over financial policy. The affair made him a local celebrity and laid the foundation for his subsequent political career.

By 1986, Kirchner had developed sufficient political capital to be put forward as the PJ's candidate for mayor of Río Gallegos. He won the 1987 elections for this post by the slimmest of margins — some one hundred votes. Fellow PJ member Ricardo del Val became governor, which kept Santa Cruz firmly within the hands of the PJ.

Kirchner's performance as mayor from 1987 to 1991 was satisfactory enough from both the point of view of the electorate and the party to enable him to run for governor in 1991, which he won with 61% of the votes. By this time his wife was also member of the provincial congress.

Governor of Santa Cruz

When Kirchner entered the governor's office, the province of Santa Cruz (pop. 200,000) only contributed one percent to Argentina's gross national product, primarily through the production of raw materials (mostly oil), and was being battered by the ongoing economic crisis, with high unemployment and a budget deficit equal to 1,200 million USD. He arranged for substantial investments to stimulate productivity, the labor market, and consumption. By eliminating unproductive expenditures and cutting back on tax exemptions for the key petroleum industry, Kirchner restored the financial equilibrium of the province. Through his expansionist and social policies, Kirchner was credited with bringing a substantial measure of prosperity to Santa Cruz. Subsequent studies showed that the province had a better distribution of wealth and lower levels of poverty than most other provinces, second only to Buenos Aires.

Kirchner emerged as a center-left Peronist, critical both of President Menem's far-reaching neoliberal model and of the syndicalist bureaucracy of the PJ. He attached great importance to not only careful management of the budgetary deficits but also economic growth based on domestic production, rather than financial speculation. He was also considered a progressive in human rights issues, voicing his opposition to Menem's decision in 1990 to grant a presidential pardon to the leaders of the last junta.

Kirchner's tasks as governor were made easier by the modest scale of the province's economic base and its limited labor market. Critics claimed he was no different from most of the other Peronist governors, and when push came to shove, he also relied on personalism and authoritarianism, above all in his handling of the provincial media and appointing his judges. Public control of job positions and a heavily-subsidized economy also lent itself to clientelism typical in the semi-feudal environment of the remote provinces.

In 1994 and 1998, Kirchner introduced amendments to the provincial constitution, so as to enable him to run for re-election indefinitely. As a member of the 1994 Constitutional Assembly organized by Menem and former president Raúl Alfonsín, Kirchner participated in the elaboration of a new national constitution, which made possible for the president to be re-elected to a second four-year term.

In 1995, with his constitutional reforms in place, Kirchner was easily re-elected to a second term in office, with 66.5% of the votes. But by now, Kirchner was distancing himself from the charismatic and controversial Menem, who was also the nominal head of the PJ; this was made particularly apparent with the launch of Corriente Peronista, an initiative supported by Kirchner to create an alternative space within the Justicialist Party, outside of Menem's influence.

In 1998, Menem's attempt to stand for re-election a second time, by means of an ad hoc interpretation of a constitutional clause, met with strong resistance among Peronist rank-and-file, who were finding themselves under increasing pressure due to the highly controversial policies of the Menem administration and its involvement in corruption scandals. Kirchner joined the camp of Menem's chief opponent within the PJ, the governor of Buenos Aires Province (and later president, 2002–2003) Eduardo Duhalde.

Menem did not run, and the PJ nominated Duhalde. The elections of 24 October 1999 were a major upset for the PJ; Duhalde was beaten by Fernando de la Rúa, the Alianza (opposition coalition) candidate, and the party lost its majority in Congress. The Alianza also made headway in Santa Cruz, but Kirchner nonetheless managed to be re-elected to a third term in May of that year with 45.7% of the vote. De la Rúa's victory was in part a rejection of Menem's perceived flamboyance and corruption during his last term. De la Rúa instituted austerity measures and reforms to improve the economy; taxes were increased to reduce the deficit, the government bureaucracy was trimmed, and legal restrictions on union negotiations were eased.

These measures did not work to stop the economic collapse. By late 2000, Argentina was deep in recession and the country was forced in to seek help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private banks to reduce its debt. In December 2000, an aid package of nearly $40,000 million was arranged, and the government announced a $20,000 million public works program that was designed to help revive the economy. Despite measures designed to revive it, the economy remained in recession, however, aggravating the problems posed by the debt and by the restrictions that the IMF imposed in return for aid. Unemployment rose to around 20% at the end of 2001. In November, the government began restructuring the debt, putting it essentially in default. Ongoing economic problems led to a crisis of confidence as depositors began a run on the banks, resulting in the highly unpopular corralito, a limit, and subsequently a full ban, on withdrawals. The IMF took a hard line, insisting on a 10% cut in the budget before making further payments.

Nationwide riots, looting, strikes and demonstrations erupted in late December, leading De La Rúa to resign (see December 2001 riots). A series of interim presidents and renewed demonstrations ended with the appointment of Duhalde as interim president in January 2002, to serve until new presidential elections in 2003. Duhalde abolished the fixed exchange rate regime that had been in place since 1991, and the Argentine peso quickly devalued by more than two thirds of its value, decimating middle-class savings and sinking the heavily import-dependent Argentine economy even deeper. There was a strong public rejection of the entire political class, characterized by the pithy slogan que se vayan todos ("away with them all").

The 2003 presidential election

Kirchner's electoral promises included "returning to a republic of equals". After the first round of the election, Kirchner visited the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who received him enthusiastically. He also declared he was proud of his radical left-wing political past.

Although Menem, who was president from 1989 to 1999, won the first round of the election on April 27, 2003, he only got 24% of the valid votes — just 2% ahead of Kirchner. This was an empty victory, as Menem had by then a strongly negative image among a large segment of the Argentine population and had virtually no chance of winning the runoff election. After days of speculation, during which polls forecast a massive victory for Kirchner with about a 30%–40% difference, Menem finally decided to stand down. This automatically made Kirchner president of Argentina. He was sworn in on May 25, 2003 to a four-year term of office.

President of Argentina

Kirchner came into office on the tail of a deep economic crisis with only 22% of votes. A country which once vied with Europe in levels of prosperity and considered itself a bulwark of European culture in Latin America found itself deeply impoverished, with a decimated middle-class and malnutrition appearing in the lower strata of society. The country was burdened with $178,000 million in debt, the government strapped for cash. While associated to the clientelist and feudal-like style of government of many provincial governors and the corruption of the PJ, Kirchner was comparatively unknown to the national public, and showed himself as a newcomer who arrived at the Casa Rosada without the usual whiff of scandal about him, trying not to make a point of the fact that he himself was seven times in the same electoral ballot with Menem.

Shortly after coming into office, Kirchner made changes to the Argentine Supreme Court. He denounced blackmailing on the part of certain justices and pressured them to resign, while also fostering the impeachment of two others. In place of a majority of politically right-wing and religiously conservative justices, he appointed new ones who were ideologically closer to him, including two women (one of them an avowed atheist). Kirchner also retired dozens of generals, admirals, and brigadiers from the armed forces, a few of them with reputations tainted by the atrocities of the Dirty War. Kirchner kept the Minister of the Economy of the Duhalde administration, Roberto Lavagna, who piloted Argentina through the unpopular corralito and the painful devaluation, but Lavagna also declared his first priority now was social problems. Argentina's default was the largest in financial history, and ironically it gave Kirchner and Lavagna a certain bargaining power with the IMF, which loathes having bad debts in its books. During his first year of office, Kirchner achieved a difficult agreement to reschedule $84,000 million in debts with international organizations, for three years. In the first half of 2005, the government launched a bond exchange to restructure the approximately $81,000 million of private debt (there were an additional $20,000 million in past defaulted interest not recognized). Over 76% of the debt was tendered and restructured for a recovery value of approximately one third of its nominal value.

Kirchner saw the 2005 parliamentary elections as a means to confirm his political power, since Carlos Menem's defection in the second round of the 2003 presidentials did not allow Kirchner to receive the large amount of votes that surveys predicted. Kirchner explicitly stated that the 2005 elections would be a mid-term plebiscite for his administration, and actively participated in the campaign in most provinces. Due to internal disagreements, the Justicialist Party did not present as such on the polls, but split into several factions. Kirchner's Frente para la Victoria (FPV, Front for Victory) was overwhelmingly the winner, following which many supporters of other factions (mostly those led by former presidents Eduardo Duhalde and Carlos Menem) migrated to the FPV.

On 15 December 2005, following Brazil's initiative, Kirchner announced the cancellation of Argentina's debt to the IMF in full and in a single payment, in a historical decision which generated controversy at the time (see Argentine debt restructuring).

Personal style and ideology

Kirchner's resistance to international financial institutions such as the IMF and his objections to free markets has surprised some observers. He has been encouraged in this regard by such figures as the iconoclastic ex-World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz, who opposes the IMF's measures as recessionary and has urged Argentina to take an independent path. In doing so, Kirchner has broken ranks with recent and current Latin American leaders such as Peru's Alejandro Toledo, who maintain a center-right economic policy. In this context, Kirchner can best be seen as part of a spectrum of new Latin American leaders, spanning from Chávez in Venezuela to Lula in Brazil and Tabaré Vázquez in Uruguay, who are actively searching for an alternative to the Washington consensus, which in the eyes of many has proven to be an unsuccessful model for economic development in the region.

Others, like The Economist, have noted that Kirchner, Chávez, Mexico presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador and in Peru, former presidential candidate Ollanta Humala all correspond to the Latin American tradition of populism. Many differentiate the new emerging Latin American leaders and their policies, as in a cover story the Financial Times in May 2006, reflected that "Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia are seen as forming a radical populist grouping that contrasts with the more moderate left-wing governments of Chile and Uruguay".

Kirchner's preference for more state involvement in the economy can be seen in measures such as a ban on beef exports in an attempt to control domestic beef prices, the nationalization of Aguas Argentinas, a water company controlled by the French group SUEZ which had been privatized during Menem's administration, or the continued policy of intervention by the Central Bank in the exchange market to maintain a high dollar-peso rate.

The opposition questions the fact that, despite controlling the majority in both chambers of Congress, Kirchner repeatedly prefers to use the legislative faculties of the executive branch, legislating through decree-laws instead of following the ordinary procedures for enacting laws. Since he came into office until may of 2006, from a total of 337 pieces of legislation originating in the executive branch that could be enacted by decree, Kirchner sent only 136 to Congress to be debated, while the other 201 were promulgated by decree. This implies 67 decrees per year, only comparable to the 545 decrees promulgated by Carlos Menem during his ten years of tenure (54,5 per year).

Kirchner has been accused of cronyism for his tendency to appoint friends and family members to high level cabinet positions (for instance, appointing his sister Alicia Kirchner as Minister of Social Development). Others have criticized Kirchner for his personalistic and confrontational style, which they view as a way of obtaining his political goals.

His collaborators and others who support and stand politically close to Kirchner are known informally as pingüinos ("penguins"), alluding to his birthplace in the cold southern region of Argentina. Some media and sectors of society have also resorted to using the letter K as a shorthand for Kirchner and his policies (as seen, for example, in the controversial group of supporters self-styled Los Jóvenes K, that is "The Young K").

External links

Office of the President
Jóvenes K — Official website.

References

Washington Times. 22 July 2003. Argentine leader defies pessimism.
BBC News. 25 May 2004. Argentine revival marks Kirchner first year.
Guareschi, Roberto. 5 Nov 2005. "Not quite the Evita of Argentine legend". New Straits Times, p. 21.
Buenos Aires Herald. March of the Penguins..
Clarín. 18 January 2006. Un combate entre "pingüinos" por la estratégica secretaría de Agricultura.
The Economist. 12 April 2006. Latin America - The return of populism.
Financial Times. 8 May 2006. Kirchner's image thrives on his rough approach.
BBC News. 18 April 2006. Analysis: Latin America's new left axis.