Kirchner Ostoic, Néstor Carlos

Kirchner Ostoic, Néstor Carlos (1950- ), President of Argentina (2003-2007). Kirchner was born in Río Gallegos, the capital of the province of Santa Cruz in southern Argentina. His father, a postal worker, was of Swiss ancestry, and his mother of Croatian descent. Kirchner studied law at the National University in La Plata. He was an activist in the Peronist youth movement (see Juan Domingo Perón) until 1976, when the advent of military government in Argentina curtailed Kirchner’s political involvement. He began his career in local government in Santa Cruz in 1982, after the collapse of the military government and the return of democracy.

In 1991 Kirchner was elected governor of Santa Cruz, which, due to its oil resources and relatively low population, was one of the wealthiest provinces in the country. His policies as governor aligned Kirchner with the centre-left of the Peronist Partido Justicialista (Justicialist Party), setting him at odds with the radical neo-liberal economic policies of fellow Peronist, President Carlos Menem. Kirchner was a critic of Menem’s conciliatory attitude to the military with regard to its implication in human rights abuses during the period 1976-1982. Nevertheless, his constitutional reforms in the province, facilitating his re-election as governor in 1994 and 1998, paralleled Menem’s efforts to perpetuate his presidency, indicating for some observers that they shared a Peronist belief in the rule of a powerful individual.

Kirchner contested the May 2003 presidential election as the centre-left Peronist candidate. Although initially regarded as little more than a proxy for the powerful Buenos Aires provincial party leader (and rival of Menem) Eduardo Duhalde, Kirchner attracted support as a candidate relatively untainted by accusations of corruption and with a strong financial record as a provincial governor (not least because he had prudently banked much of the state’s funds outside of Argentina, protecting them from the devaluation of the peso in January 2002). He was narrowly beaten by Menem, who was attempting a political comeback, in the first round of the election. Menem subsequently withdrew from the contest, a move that was widely seen as an attempt to weaken the mandate of his Peronist rival, who effectively won the election by default. Nevertheless, Kirchner rapidly asserted his authority by overseeing the passage of legislation to remove immunity from military officers accused of human rights abuses under the dictatorship and negotiating rescheduled debt repayments with the IMF, a step towards restoring Argentina’s solvency after the financial crisis of 2001-2002. In January 2005 Kirchner announced a scheme for further debt restructuring through a debt swap. According to the scheme, Argentina would repay a limited amount to bondholders by exchanging their old bonds for new, though many of the new bonds were of a substantially lower face value. Despite this, by the time the offer closed in March around 70 per cent of bondholders had accepted the deal.

Despite continued popularity, and the sustained growth of the economy during his tenure, at the beginning of July 2007 Kirchner announced that he would not run for a second term as president. Instead, he gave his support to the candidacy of his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, already a member of the Argentine senate. At the presidential election held in October of that year, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner won almost 45 per cent of the vote, ensuring that there would be no second round.