Home Appointments President
President
Argentina Government
| Appointee | Cristina Fernández de Kirchner |
|---|---|
| Role | President |
| Organisation | Argentina Government |
| Domain | Politics |
| Start | 10 December 2007 |
| End | 10 December 2015 |
| Notes | First woman elected President of Argentina |
Institutional context
The President of Argentina is the head of state and head of government, elected to a four-year term. Isabel Perón had served as President from 1974 to 1976 by vice-presidential succession from her late husband Juan Perón; Fernández de Kirchner is the first woman directly elected to the Argentine presidency.
Career path
Cristina Elisabet Fernández de Kirchner (born 1953) is a lawyer educated at the National University of La Plata. She served as a Senator and Deputy of Argentina's national legislature for two decades and was First Lady of Argentina from 2003 to 2007 during the presidency of her husband, Néstor Kirchner.
Appointment
She won the October 2007 presidential election in the first round with approximately 45 percent of the vote. She was sworn in on 10 December 2007. She is the first woman elected President of Argentina, and the second to hold the office after Isabel Perón.
Tenure
Eight years across two terms. Her tenure included the renationalisation of YPF (the Argentine oil company) in 2012, prolonged litigation over Argentine sovereign debt, and substantial inflation. Néstor Kirchner died in October 2010 during her first term. She left office on 10 December 2015 and subsequently served as Vice President from 2019 to 2023.
Cluster context
Fernández de Kirchner's 2007 appointment is the dataset's third elected first-woman head of state in the Americas after Chamorro (Nicaragua 1990) and Bachelet (Chile 2006). Together with Chinchilla (Costa Rica 2010), Rousseff (Brazil 2011), Castro (Honduras 2022), Boluarte (Peru 2022), and Sheinbaum (Mexico 2024), the Latin American sequence is the dataset's most sustained regional pattern.