Argentine President Nestor Kirchner announced on Monday that he would not seek a second term as president but would instead support his wife, Senator Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, as the candidate of the Peronist movement in the October poll.
"Why not finally a woman to be the one to deepen change and transformation?" Kirchner, with his wife at his side, asked during an afternoon event at the presidential palace.
Argentina needs "to renew and generate new ideas," he said, and "all of us profoundly believe in the capacity to excel that Cristina is going to offer."
Kirchner's decision to step aside in favor of his wife is seen as a maneuver meant to allow the couple to take turns running the country for a dozen years or more.
Presidents are restricted to two consecutive four-year terms, but can run again after a term on the sidelines.
Fernandez is so strongly identified ideologically with her husband's administration that critics say any government she leads would be the "same package in a different wrapping."
The decision is in line with a long Peronist tradition of pushing wives of powerful leaders into positions of power, starting with Evita Peron, the wife of the movement's founder, General Juan Domingo Peron, in the 1940s. In the 1970s, Peron's last wife, Maria Estela Peron, known as Isabelita, stood as his running mate. She succeeded him as president when he died in July 1974 and was overthrown in a military coup in March 1976.
Many political analysts prefer to compare the couple to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Fernandez, 54, is a lawyer with a political base of her own, having served in the lower house of Congress before being elected to the Senate.
Argentina's power couple has been playing coy about their political intentions for more than a year. At one point, Kirchner, 57, teasingly said the Peronist candidate would be "a penguin," mentioning both the masculine and feminine forms of the word, which is used as a nickname for people from his native Patagonia region.
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