Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina Elizabet (1953– )

Argentine politician, president from 2007. She won the October 2007 presidential election by a landslide margin to become the country's first elected female president and was also the first wife in history elected to succeed her husband as president. A forceful speaker, she is popular among the rural poor and suburban working class. She provided continuity, retaining over half of the ministers from the preceding government.

Born in La Plata, in Buenos Aires province, she studied law at the National University of La Plata, where she met Nestor Kirchner, who she married in 1975. Active since the 1970s in the Peronist Justicialist Party, she was elected to the Santa Cruz provincial legislature in 1989 and to represent Santa Cruz in the senate in 1995 and again in 2001. Her husband was elected president in 2003 and she served as an itinerant ambassador for his government.