Argentina's Presidential Front-Runner Goes Global

BUENOS AIRES -- With an election just three weeks away and 14 candidates vying to become Argentina's next president, the front-runner spent part of this past week campaigning in Brazil.

The trip was the latest stop on first lady Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's wide-ranging campaign trail, which has included appearances in France, Germany, Ecuador, Spain, Mexico, the United States and other countries. Instead of wooing voters for the Oct. 28 election, she has been courting allies and investors for the next four years.

According to the latest polls, the strategy hasn't hurt her at home: She leads a cluster of rivals by 20 to 30 percentage points.

"Her entire campaign has been done more from abroad than from within this country," said Heriberto Muraro, a pollster at the Buenos Aires firm Telesurvey. "She wants to give the impression of an Argentina that's more open and less isolated than it has been after the economic collapse."

Her husband, President Néstor Kirchner, has overseen a government on the mend from the country's 2001 economic collapse and $100 billion debt default. Since he took office in 2003, the economy has grown about 8 percent annually and unemployment has plummeted -- achievements that are responsible for much of the support his wife now claims.

But President Kirchner also has made no effort to hide a near-total disinterest in matters of diplomacy, regularly shunning the most basic tenants of protocol, such as meeting ambassadors and entertaining visiting heads of state. His defiance of organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and his unapologetic refusal to fully repay investors who owned Argentine bonds at the time of the collapse stirred tensions among some of the same people that Fern¿ndez de Kirchner has tried to court in recent weeks.

"She has shown that there will be a profound change in terms of diplomacy, but not necessarily a change in actual foreign policy," said Rosendo Fraga, a political analyst based in Buenos Aires. "It's a difference of style, not of political substance."

During the campaign, Fernández de Kirchner has voiced her support for Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, suggesting that she will share the same regional challenge her husband faced: trying to maintain close ties with the Venezuelan populist, who provides billions in financing to Argentina, without turning off potential investors in the United States and Europe.

Her travel schedule has been criticized by her opponents, who say she has ignored domestic problems that have lingered during her husband's term -- energy shortages, tension among labor unions and fears that the economic recovery isn't as solid as the government claims. Like her husband, she has declined to give media interviews within Argentina, a strategy that many in the local press label an attempt to avoid addressing some of the most controversial issues of the campaign.

"The worst error is not to acknowledge the reality of the inflationary problem," Elisa Carri¿, a former congresswoman who is running a distant second to Kirchner in most polls, said at a campaign event last week.

Inflation has become an emblematic campaign issue for critics of the Kirchners. Although most independent economists say that Argentina's inflation this year will likely hover at 15 to 20 percent, government estimates cut that figure roughly in half. The difference has led to widespread accusations of data tampering on the part of government officials.

The inflation controversy -- along with accusations of corruption against some members of the president's cabinet -- have eroded some of Kirchner's public support in recent months, but it has done little to chip away at his wife's commanding lead in the polls.

A survey published in La Nación newspaper last week estimated that Fern¿ndez de Kirchner has 39.8 percent of the vote, followed by Carri¿ with 11.7 percent. Other polls have shown Kirchner leading Carri¿ and former economy minister Roberto Lavagna by about 20 percentage points.

To avoid a November runoff, the winner of the election must get at least 45 percent of all votes cast, or get at least 40 percent and defeat the nearest challenger by at least 10 points.

The 13 opposition candidates have struggled to gain traction. As recently as late August, some of them were still trying to negotiate compromises and determine among themselves who would actually run. None of them has the support of an established political party with strong backing in all regions of the country.

"With the collapse of the Radical Party and the resignation of [President] Fernando de la Rúa in 2001, in a sense the only institutionalized opposition disappeared," said Riordan Roett, director of the Western Hemisphere Program at Johns Hopkins University. "The vacuum has been filled by personalities. These really aren't institutionalized movements but rather individuals."

If elected, Fernández de Kirchner would be the second female elected president in South America in the past two years, following the victory of Chile's Michelle Bachelet last year. But gender was a far more visible issue in that election than it has been this year in Argentina, where arguably the most popular historical political figure is Eva Perón.

And the first lady, who has served as a national senator for both the provinces of Santa Cruz and Buenos Aires, is quick to remind people that she had a political life before her husband became president.

"I was much more well known than he was before, because he was a provincial governor and I was a national senator with a very strong, very high public profile," Fernández de Kirchner said during an interview in Mexico this year with CNN's Spanish-language service. "It prompted some to say in 2003, 'Why isn't she the candidate?' "