CRISTINA KIRCHNER was re-elected president of Argentina in a historic triumph on Sunday, with voters trusting the populist leader to maintain the country’s recovery from 2001’s economic collapse amid gathering clouds on the economic horizon.
With most votes counted, Ms Kirchner took 54 per cent of the vote, over 37 points ahead of the second-placed candidate, socialist Hermes Binner.
By doing so she becomes the first woman president to win re-election in Latin America.
Her share of the vote was the largest since 1973, when Juan Domingo Perón, the founder of Ms Kirchner’s populist Peronist movement, won the last of his three presidential elections.
The landslide also saw the president’s leftist Victory Front grouping within the fractious Peronist movement regain control of the lower house of congress and strengthen its grip on the senate. Kirchner loyalists also won eight of the nine governorships in dispute on Sunday, including the all-important province of Buenos Aires, home to over a third of the electorate.
The result caps an extraordinary comeback for a president who 12 months ago languished at 20 per cent in opinion polls. Deeply unpopular, her chances of a second term were written off following the sudden death of her husband, predecessor and political partner Néstor Kirchner from a heart attack a year ago on Thursday.
But Ms Kirchner made astute political use of her widowhood to win back public support, while high taxes on Argentina’s booming agricultural exports provided her with unprecedented amounts of revenue to distribute liberally across the rest of the economy. As a result, growth this year will be around 8 per cent and the number of people living in poverty has fallen from one in two in 2002 to one in five today.
During an often emotional night in Buneos Aires, the president made reference to her deceased husband, telling supporters: “More than ever he is here with us,” as the crowd chanted, “Néstor did not die!” Later in the Plaza de Mayo she held up a poster of the couple embracing on the night of her first election in 2007.
In her victory speech, Ms Kirchner struck a conciliatory tone, calling for “national reconciliation” and an end to “useless confrontation” in reference to the often bitter disputes that have marked pubic life in Argentina.
She also promised to continue with her unorthodox economic model, telling the crowd “count on me to continue deepening a project for the country” just as economists warn the global downturn will subject her populist policy mix to a stern examination.
High inflation and economic uncertainty have already provoked a surge in capital flight, forcing the central bank to dip into foreign reserves to prop up the currency.
Meanwhile lavish public spending in the run-up to Sunday’s vote means the government is already running a deficit, which analysts warn leaves public finances vulnerable to any global downturn that might affect demand for Argentina’s highly taxed soy beans.