Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner is reelected
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, whose first two years as president were marred by protests and tumbling ratings, made a dramatic turnaround on the back of Argentina’s fast-growing economy and scored a landslide reelection victory Sunday, according to exit polls.
With the economy having grown 9 percent last year, Fernandez de Kirchner crushed a fractured opposition that fielded six opponents, none of whom came within 40 points of the incumbent. With 55 percent of Argentines voting for her, according to exit polls, Fernandez de Kirchner’s margin of victory would be the widest in a presidential election since democracy replaced a brutal military dictatorship in 1983.
The victory was seen as a mandate for Fernandez de Kirchner, 58, to continue unorthodox economic policies rooted in heavy state spending while paying little heed to bondholders trying to collect billions of dollars in unpaid debt.
“With what’s happening in the world, you have to feel very proud,” she said as she was mobbed by supporters after casting her vote in the Patagonian provincial city of Rio Gallegos. “After a lifetime of pushing those ideas, we now see that they were not a mistake and that we are on the right path.”
As she frequently reminds her citizens, her policies are the same as those of her late husband and predecessor in the presidency, Nestor Kirchner. He took office in 2003, a year after Argentina had descended into economic calamity upon its $100 billion sovereign debt default, the largest in history.
Buoyed by a sharp and sustained demand from China and elsewhere for soy and other Argentine agricultural products, the economy grew at an annual average of 7.6 percent over the past eight years. Kirchner and then his wife, after taking office in 2007, have used the windfall to fund cash transfers to poor families, energy subsidies and other social programs.
Economists in Argentina say her government has also resorted to doctoring inflation figures, so the official numbers do not reflect the 25 to 30 percent annual rise recorded by private economists. Fernandez de Kirchner’s government has also defiantly fought off lawsuits and other claims from disgruntled creditors chasing down money that is owed to them, which has led to increasing friction with the Obama administration and multinational lenders.
Economists and opposition politicians here say that the government’s high-spending ways, coupled with a world economic slowdown, could catch up with Argentina, a country familiar with cyclical booms and busts.
“We’re happily dancing on the Titanic,” said one of Fernandez de Kirchner’s challengers, Eduardo Duhalde, who preceded Kirchner as president…