In Argentine Race, A Diplomatic Touch

Cristina Kirchner Campaigns Overseas In Bid to Succeed Husband as President

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 the past week campaigning in Brazil.

The trip was the latest stop on first lady Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's wide-ranging campaign trail, which in recent months has included appearances in Germany, Austria, Ecuador, Mexico, the United States and other countries. Often, 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 opinion 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 analysts say are responsible for much of the support his wife now claims.

But the president also has made no effort to hide a near-total disinterest in matters of diplomacy, regularly shunning the most basic tenets 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 Fernández 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, 54, has voiced her support for Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, suggesting that she will confront 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 Carrió, a former congresswoman who is running a distant second to Fernández de Kirchner in most opinion polls, said at a campaign event last week.

Inflation has become an emblematic campaign issue for critics of the Kirchners. Although most independent economists expect that Argentina's inflation this year will likely hover at 15 to 20 percent, the government estimate is half that figure. 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 -- has 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.