[A-List] Argentina: Kirchner profile

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Argentina pins hope on Patagonia's mystery man
By Hannah Baldock in Buenos Aires
The Independent
16 May 2003

Until Carlos Menem pulled out of the presidential race in Argentina, Nestor
Kirchner, 53, was the little-known governor of Santa Cruz, a remote
Patagonian province rich in oil and glaciers.

Yesterday Mr Kirchner prepared to assume the presidency without majority
electoral support, and began assembling a new government and cobbling
together the support of feuding political leaders from his own Peronist
party

Mr Kirchner's relative anonymity was one of his trump cards in bringing
round Argentinians disgusted with the corrupt old guard. His campaign
posters portrayed his grave, hyperthyroid gaze above the slogan, "A serious
country". A tall, grey lawyer of German-Swiss-Croatian descent with a squint
and a lisp, what Mr Kirchner lacks in charisma, his striking, fiercely
intelligent senator wife Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner makes up for.

He is a centre-left progressive populist, who recognises the importance of
foreign investment, but not the "carnal relations" he said Mr Menem
maintained with the United States during Argentina's brief period of
prosperity in the 1990s, at the expense of jobs and production at home,
which now languishes in 58 per cent poverty and 18 per cent unemployment. Mr
Kirchner and his wife were militants in the Peronist Youth in the 1970s, but
deny Mr Menem's accusation that they were Montoneros, the extreme left-wing
Peronist offshoot involved in terrorism.

Cristina rejected the title First Lady yesterday in favour of First Citizen.
Few doubt the strong-minded senator for Santa Cruz province influences her
husband's decisions.

When he first spoke of standing for president, he was portrayed as the
poodle of the incumbent, Eduardo Duhalde, a Peronist, who had promised to
leave office, but was obsessed with keeping his arch-rival, Mr Menem, out of
power.

When it became clear this week that Mr Kirchner would have to assume the
presidency on 25 May with only 22 per cent of the vote, many feared it was a
licence for Mr Duhalde to continue pulling the strings. Yet during his
campaign he has come across as a serious man of strong conviction, and has
refused to be coerced into pacts with Peronist factions or corporate or
other interests.

Such pledges of ethical rigour have earned him the approval of 46 per cent
of Argentinians, the highest of any front-line politician. He will also
retain Roberto Lavagna as Finance Minister, who is also highly popular,
having stabilised the economy over the past year and negotiated a
life-saving $6.3bn (£3.8bn) debt relief deal with the IMF. However, Mr
Kirchner is still a member of the Peronist party, a notoriously unwieldy and
corrupt machine which rarely grants leaders autonomy.

He has a reputation for fiscal prudence - when he became governor of Santa
Cruz (a post he has held three consecutive times), the province was $1bn in
debt and, after returning its books to the black, he shrewdly stowed part of
its savings to banks in Switzerland and Luxembourg. A move of uncanny
prescience, since they avoided being frozen and devalued by up to 70 per
cent in December 2001.

While his fiscal record is encouraging many point out that it is not that
hard to administer the finances of a province rich in oil and gas, with a
population of only 200,000. Yet, in a country dogged by 18 per cent
employment and with 58 per cent living in poverty, and 20 per cent child
malnutrition, Mr Kirchner's achievements strike a chord.

He pledges to put the needs of the poorest over corporate interests,
planning tax reform to achieve a greater distribution of wealth, pledging or
example to demand a sizeable "haircut" of Argentina's external debt (it owes
$55bn to private foreign bondholders and $30bn to multilateral lenders) and
more time to pay it back at lower interest rates.

He favours state control of education, health and pensions and proposes to
create jobs through a programme of investment in infrastructure,
particularly housing.

With the economy now emerging from a five-year recession, and predicted to
grow at around 4 per cent for the next two years, Mr Kirchner should get a
better shot at it than his recent predecessors.