Nestor Kirchner, Argentina's most popular president in decades, draped the light-blue-and-white sash over the shoulder of his wife, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, on Monday, officially passing power to the first woman to be elected Argentina's leader in its 191-year history.
The handover was sealed with an emphatic, crowd-pleasing hug that seemed to make Cristina Kirchner blush. She repeatedly stroked her husband's back during the embrace. No modern-day couple in a democracy has carried out a comparable transfer of power, and certainly not in Latin America.
In their four and a half years in the presidential palace, the couple, affectionately known as "the penguins" -- a reference to Nestor Kirchner's Patagonian home state of Santa Cruz -- have evolved into Latin America's dynamic duo, power brokers who hold sway over their country of 40 million people.
One major reason is Nestor Kirchner's stewardship following the country's worst financial crisis. The improvements in the country were, Cristina Kirchner said, "a result of his convictions," which she added, "are also mine."
Since shortly after Nestor Kirchner announced in July that he would not run for re-election and would back his wife's candidacy instead, the couple have made little secret of their plans to lead together. Cristina Kirchner conducted a carefully orchestrated campaign heavy on international diplomacy but light on opportunities for rigorous press questioning or debates with her rivals. In the end, facing a fractured opposition, she won emphatically, doubling the vote percentage that her husband was able to muster in 2003, when he got 22 percent before a rival dropped out.
"This says a lot about the weakness of Argentina's political party institutions," said Joan Caivano, director of special projects at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, who has studied the role of woman in Latin American politics.
"She was anointed by a very popular president, and that doesn't feel like a good thing for a democracy," she said.
But few doubt that the 54-year-old Cristina Kirchner, who served in Congress for a decade, has the political skills to lead. In her typically emphatic inauguration speech on Monday, she set out an agenda that emphasized greater South American integration and a desire to return Argentina to the world stage after four years in which her husband focused on improving the economy after the crisis in 2001.
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