Argentina's recently elected president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was due to visit London this week for the Progressive Governance conference. She was forced to cancel her trip owing to a national strike by Argentinian farmers, who are outraged by a series of new taxes. This has led to food shortages, road blockages and anti-government demonstrations—not the kind of image Kirchner wanted to project abroad.
Argentina has been a constitutional democracy ever since the fall of the last military junta in 1983. The experience has not been successful. Ever since becoming a republic in 1853, the country has had a fraught relationship with the notion of a constitution, guaranteed rights, separation of powers, press freedom and the role of the opposition. Democracy in Argentina, unlike its neighbours Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, grows weaker with every president because, as with the western diet adopted by suddenly wealthy Asian nations, the body politic is not suited to it. Other than the populist Peronist movement, no political party has an effective national presence. The country has for all intents and purposes become a one-party state, with the inevitable financial corruption and authoritarianism.
When Cristina's husband Néstor was inaugurated as Argentina's president in 2003, nobody imagined that his wife would succeed him. But then many people thought there would be no successor. The economic collapse of 2001 had brought the country close to disintegration. Néstor Kirchner became president only because none of the bigger figures in the Peronist party wanted the job, which was seen as a political tombstone. As governor of Santa Cruz (a Patagonian province larger than Britain but with only 200,000 inhabitants) between 1991 and 2003, Kirchner was an effective administrator and an authoritarian leader. As president of Argentina, he applied the same tactics to a country of 40m. Arguing that the fallout from the financial crisis demanded strong leadership, Kirchner asked congress to extend the extraordinary powers that were granted to his predecessor, Eduardo Duhalde, after Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt. Two years ago, he asked for those powers to be made permanent, and this was granted. They removed most of the levers the legislature had over the executive, including approval of the national budget and control of provincial funds.
Cristina Fernández met her husband-to-be when they were both studying law at the University of La Plata, her home town, in the early 1970s. It was a turbulent time. The attempt by military rulers to eliminate Peronism from politics, following the 1955 coup in which Perón was deposed, was ending. Peronism was on the move again. A mixture of contempt for the right-wing military's undemocratic ways, idealism, muddled thinking and the machine-gun chic of the 1970s led many students, including the Kirchners, to join the youth wing of the Peronist movement. One of their contemporaries recalls that there were two kinds of Peronist activists: those who were sent to public meetings to debate and persuade, and those in charge of bullying and silencing the opposition. Néstor Kirchner was among the latter.
In 1976, after another military coup, Néstor and Cristina gave up politics and moved to Santa Cruz, where he made money in property and practised as a lawyer. He entered politics again in 1983, after the fall of the military dictatorship, and became mayor of Rio Gallegos in 1987. In 1989 Cristina became a provincial deputy, and in 1995 a senator, where she played a crucial role in her husband's bid to become the Peronist presidential candidate. Ten years later, with her husband safely installed in office, she became senator for the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina's most important electoral ground.
By 2007, Néstor was the most popular president for 50 years. His skill at balancing budgets was undeniable, his indifference to any other point of view helped him push through a tough settlement of the defaulted debt with international creditors, and he was lucky in overseeing a huge rise in prices for agricultural commodities, which restored trade surpluses. These days half of arable land is dedicated to soya, and China pays extraordinary prices for the crop. The economy grew at 8 or 9 per cent a year under Néstor, but this followed a crash that saw GNP reduced to a third of what it had been before 2001. Even now, Argentina remains poorer than it was nearly 20 years ago, when it was poorer than it had been 40 years earlier.
And the country continues to have major problems. Crime, already high, is rising. So is inflation, at an annual rate of 23 per cent. The country suffers serious energy shortages. Compared to other major Latin American countries, foreign investment is insignificant, and shrinking.
After stepping down, Néstor took control of the Peronist party again, and he is now attempting to turn it into a pan-national movement that will represent every sector of the country, thus eliminating the need for opposition. A monolithic, everlasting system has always been the holy grail of Peronism (Perón never lost his admiration for Mussolini), something in line with the understanding of many Argentines of what government should be. Néstor's movement is Peronism without the name. If he had an easier surname for Latin ears, no doubt that the movement would be called the "Partido Kirchnerista."
Argentine politics are too idiosyncratic to hold any lessons for more developed societies, but Cristina Kirchner exemplifies a figure familiar in the northern hemisphere because of Hillary Clinton (and to a lesser degree Cherie Blair): the intelligent, educated wife of a leader with ambitions of her own. Robert Graves wrote in I, Claudius: "Augustus ruled the world, and Livia ruled Augustus." Until recently, that was as far as the wife of a politician could go. Now they run for the job, which raises two questions: if they were unable to break through until their husbands had done so, can they stand the pressure on their own? And what is the role of the ex-president once his wife is in power? Maureen Dowd has written in the New York Times that if Bill Clinton had not been president, Hillary now would be running for the presidency of Vassar College, not the US. That applies even more so to Cristina Kirchner.
In her speech following her election victory in October 2007, Cristina seemed to aim for a more comprehensive, tolerant approach to government than her husband's. Yet this apparently new turn lasted only until the first unexpected crisis a week later, when the US government accused four Venezuelan men in Miami of trying to hush up an alleged attempt by the Venezuelan government to bankroll Cristina's election campaign. Rather than leaving the matter to the lower ranks of the foreign ministry, Cristina publicly ranted against the US government. Failing to show an understanding of the separation of powers in the US, she complained that the American judiciary was acting at the behest of the executive to embarrass her. Since then, the tone of her governing style has been reminiscent of the worst excesses of her husband.
Success in marriage, personal and professional, implies accommodation between partners. Ambitious politicians can't have a marriage of equals. They set the target and their partner adapts his or her life to it. No matter how intelligent and politically minded that partner might be, their role is not unlike that of a British monarch: they are informed, they warn and they advise, but the final decision can't be theirs. It is not easy to change the dynamics of a relationship after many years.
Cristina remains her husband's creation. Sycophants suggest she might be the new Eva Perón, which seems unlikely. "I wanted to make a difference," Evita said when asked about her extraordinary life. Like Cristina, she acquired power through her husband, but then she turned it into her own tool to change her country irreversibly. Cristina is more articulate and far better educated than Evita; she can discuss complex policies with great aplomb. But so far she has given no sign that she aimed for power for any reason other than to satisfy her exceptional ambition. Bereft of her own ideas, she is just a mirror for her husband's.
