Cristina Elísabet Fernández de Kirchner (born 19 February 1953) is an Argentine lawyer and politician who served as the 55th President of Argentina from 2007 to 2015, and later as the 37th Vice President of Argentina under President Alberto Fernández from 2019 to 2023. The widow of Néstor Kirchner, she was also First Lady during his presidency from 2003 to 2007. She was the second female president of Argentina after Isabel Perón and the first to be directly elected to office. Ideologically self-identified as a Peronist and a progressive, her political approach is called Kirchnerism. Since 2024, she has been the president of the Justicialist Party.
Born in La Plata, Buenos Aires Province, she studied law at the National University of La Plata, and moved to Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz, with her husband, Néstor Kirchner, upon graduation. She was elected to the provincial legislature, while her husband was elected mayor of Río Gallegos. She was elected national senator in 1995, and had a controversial tenure, while her husband was elected governor of Santa Cruz. In 1994, she was also elected to the constituent assembly that amended the Constitution of Argentina.
Néstor Kirchner did not run for re-election. Instead, she became the candidate for the Front for Victory alliance, becoming president in the 2007 presidential election. Her first term of office started with a conflict with the agricultural sector, and her proposed taxation system was rejected. After this she nationalized private pension funds, and fired the president of the Central Bank. The price of public services remained subsidized, and she renationalized energy firm YPF as a result. The country had good relations with other South American nations, and strained relations with the western bloc as part of the regional political movement known as pink tide. She also continued her husband's human rights policies, and had a rocky relationship with the press. Néstor Kirchner died in 2010, and she was re-elected for a second term in 2011. She won the 2011 general election with 54.11% of the votes, the highest percentage obtained by any presidential candidate since 1983. She established currency controls during her second term, and the country fell into sovereign default in 2014.
During her terms as president, several corruption scandals surfaced and her government subsequently faced several demonstrations. She was acquitted of charges related to fraudulent low price sales of dollar futures. In 2015, she was indicted for obstructing the investigation into the 1994 AMIA bombing after federal prosecutor Alberto Nisman filed a legal complaint, alleging that the Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2013 between Argentina and Iran secured impunity for Iranians involved in the terrorist attack. In 2017, an arrest warrant issued by Claudio Bonadio charged her with "treason". Due to her parliamentary immunity, she did not go to prison, and the treason accusation was later dropped, while other charges related to Nisman's accusation remained. In 2018, she was indicted for corruption over allegations that her administration had accepted bribes in exchange for public works contracts. In September 2020, the federal criminal cassation court confirmed the corruption trials of Fernández de Kirchner, ruling her objections inadmissible. In October 2021, the Federal Oral Court 8 ruled that no crime had been committed in the Iran-memorandum case, and dismissed the charges against Fernández de Kirchner. In December 2024, the Supreme Court affirmed a 2023 ruling that revoked the acquittal handed down by Court 8, and ordered Fernández to stand trial for this case. In December 2022, she was sentenced in the road infrastructure case to six years in prison and a lifetime ban from holding public office for corruption. The verdict was upheld by a federal appeals court in November 2024, and by the Supreme Court in June 2025.
Cristina Fernández was born on 19 February 1953 in Tolosa, a suburb of La Plata, capital of the Buenos Aires Province. She is the daughter of Eduardo Fernández and Ofelia Esther Wilhelm. Eduardo was a bus driver and an anti-Peronist, and Ofelia was a Peronist union leader and a single mother. Fernández married her and moved into her house when Cristina was two years old. Most details about her childhood such as her elementary school are unknown. She attended high school at Popular Mercantil and Misericordia schools. Three of her grandparents were Spanish immigrants, specifically from Galicia.
She began her college studies at the National University of La Plata. She studied psychology for a year, then dropped it and studied law instead. She met fellow student Néstor Kirchner in 1973. He introduced her to political debates. There were heated political controversies at the time caused by the decline of the Argentine Revolution military government, the return of the former president Juan Perón from exile, the election of Héctor Cámpora as president of Argentina, and the early stages of the Dirty War. She became influenced by Peronism, left-wing politics, and anti-imperialism. Despite the presence of sympathizers of the Montoneros guerrillas in La Plata, the Kirchners had never been involved themselves. Cristina and Néstor married in a civil ceremony on 9 May 1975. Her mother got them administrative jobs at her union. The 1976 Argentine coup d'état took place the following year. Cristina proposed to move to Río Gallegos, Néstor's home city, but he delayed their departure until his graduation on 3 July 1976.
Cristina had not yet graduated when they moved to Río Gallegos and completed the remaining subjects with distance education. There have been claims made that she never graduated and that she may have worked as a lawyer without having a degree. This idea was proposed by the constitutionalist Daniel Sabsay, and fueled by the reluctance of the National University of La Plata (UNLP) to release her degree. She registered at the Tribunal Superior de Justicia of Santa Cruz in 1980, Comodoro Rivadavia's chamber of appeals in 1985 and worked as an attorney for the Justicialist Party in 1983. There are also logs of minor cases where she acted as a lawyer. The claim has been sent to trial four times, and the judges Norberto Oyarbide, Ariel Lijo, Sergio Torres, and Claudio Bonadio all ruled that she has a degree.
Néstor established a law firm that Cristina joined in 1979. The firm worked for banks and financial groups that filed eviction lawsuits, which had a growing rate at the time because the 1050 ruling of the Central Bank had increased the interest rates for mortgage loans. The Kirchners acquired twenty-one land lots at cheap prices as they were about to be auctioned. Their law firm defended military personnel accused of committing crimes during the Dirty War. Forced disappearances were common at the time, but unlike other lawyers the Kirchners never signed a habeas corpus. Julio César Strassera, prosecutor in the 1985 Trial of the Juntas against the military, criticized the Kirchners' lack of legal actions against the military, and considered their later interest in the issue a form of hypocrisy.
Fernández de Kirchner was elected deputy for the provincial legislature of Santa Cruz in 1989. The Justicialist Party (PJ), led by Carlos Menem, returned to the presidency in the 1989 general elections. She served as interim governor of Santa Cruz for a couple of days, after the impeachment of Ricardo del Val in 1990. She organized Néstor's political campaign when he was elected governor of Santa Cruz in 1991. In 1994, she was elected to the constituent assembly that amended the Constitution of Argentina.
She was elected national senator in the 1995 general elections. She opposed some bills proposed by Menem, such as a treaty with Chilean president Patricio Aylwin that benefited Chile in a dispute over the Argentina–Chile border. The Minister of Defense Oscar Camilión was questioned in Congress about the Argentine arms trafficking scandal; Kirchner told him that he had to resign, which he refused to do. As a result, she made a name for herself as a troublemaker. She was removed from the PJ bloc in the Congress in 1997 for misconduct. She resigned her senatorial seat that year and ran for national deputy in the 1997 midterm elections instead. Menem ended his term of office in 1999 and was replaced by Fernando de la Rúa. Fernández de Kirchner took part in a commission to investigate money laundering with fellow legislator Elisa Carrió, and got into conflicts with her. She ran again for senator in the 2001 midterm elections.