Argentine politics in flux: Can ‘Kirchnerism’ survive without Kirchner?
When Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner started her livestream following a high-profile corruption conviction last week, few expected the divisive former president to elicit a united response.
Yet, when espousing her innocence, she announced she would not run again for public office at any level, bringing together Argentines of all political stripes into a state of shock.
Ms. Kirchner and her late husband, Néstor Kirchner, have been mainstays in the Argentine political scene for three decades, creating a movement known as Kirchnerismo out of the ashes of Argentina’s economic collapse in the early 2000s. Part of the broader Peronist movement – a political umbrella group rooted in working-class support that took shape in the 1940s and shifts depending on the era – Kirchnerism has earned adoration from the nation’s poor and
