Alberto Fernández

Alberto Fernández (born April 2, 1959, Buenos Aires, Argentina) Argentine politician and lawyer who became president of Argentina in 2020. After a long career as a consummate behind-the-scenes wielder of power, high-stakes negotiator, and bureaucrat, Fernández stepped into the spotlight in 2019 as the presidential candidate of the Front for All (Frente de Todos; FdT) coalition on a slate that included former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–15) as its candidate for vice president. Alberto Fernández had served as campaign manager and chief of staff for Fernández de Kirchner’s husband, Néstor Kirchner, during his tenure as the country’s president (2003–07) and briefly filled those roles for Fernández de Kirchner at the beginning of her presidency before becoming a persistent critic of her rule. After nearly a decade as adversaries, Fernández and Fernández de Kirchner mended their political fences and combined to trounce incumbent president Mauricio Macri in the October 2019 election, returning the executive branch to Peronist control.

Fernández grew up in a prominent family in Buenos Aires. His stepfather, Carlos Pelagio Galíndez, was a federal judge, and his step-grandfather, Manuel Galíndez, served in the Senate of La Rioja province. After attending Mariano Moreno High School, Fernández studied at the law school of the University of Buenos Aires, attaining his law degree in 1983. Soon after his graduation, he began teaching at the law school, a pursuit he would continue throughout his career in politics.

A political activist during his student days, Fernández became affiliated with the Radical Civic Union Party during the 1980s. For most of his political career, however, he was a member of the Peronist Justicialist Party. During the presidential administration of Raúl Alfonsín, Fernández held a position as deputy director of the legal department of the Ministry of the Economy. He also developed a friendship with economist Domingo Cavallo, who would become a prominent member of the cabinet of the next president, Carlos Menem.

In 1989, during Menem’s presidency, Fernández became the national superintendent of insurance and served in that capacity until 1995. During his tenure, he oversaw deregulation of the country’s insurance industry, served as president of the Association of Insurance Superintendents of Latin America, and, in 1994, cofounded the International Association of Insurance Supervisors. During this period, Fernández also represented Argentina as negotiator in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and at Mercosur. Fernández left his post as insurance superintendent when Cavallo resigned as Menem’s minister of the economy.

From 1997 to 2000, Fernández served as an executive in the finance and insurance industries. In 1999 he worked on the unsuccessful presidential campaign of Peronist Eduardo Duhalde (subsequently elected in 2002). In 2001 Fernández became a candidate for the Buenos Aires city legislature on the ticket headed by Cavallo, who was running for mayor. Cavallo lost. Fernández won.

In the late 1990s, Fernández and Néstor Kirchner, then the relatively unknown governor of Santa Cruz province, came to each other’s attention. At a dinner meeting arranged by a mutual friend, the two hit it off immediately. Fernández became a founding member of Calafate Group, a think tank made up of Peronist opponents of Menem. Fernández then acted as Kirchner’s campaign manager in his triumphant run for the country’s top office in 2003 and remained at Kirchner’s side as his chief of staff during the popular president’s term. When Cristina Fernández de Kirchner succeeded her husband as president in 2007, Fernández became her chief of staff, but he stayed in the post for less than a year, stepping down because of policy disagreements over matters that included farm export duties as well as Fernández de Kirchner’s attempts to politicize the judiciary and to limit the influence of an opposition media conglomerate. As a private citizen, Fernández continued to criticize the president for introducing measures he deemed reckless, for mismanaging the economy, and for simply leading a “bad government.”  

Fernández de Kirchner was constitutionally prohibited from running for another consecutive term in 2015 when she completed her second term. She left office dogged by a scandal involving the death of a special prosecutor, and, out of office, she became the focus of other scandals that included indictments of her on charges of fraud and corruption. Still, having seen the presidency lost in 2015 to conservative Mauricio Macri, the broad spectrum of Peronists seemed to be looking to her to bear their standard in the 2019 presidential election.

In the meantime, in 2011, Fernández published Políticamente incorrecto: razones y pasiones de Néstor Kirchner (“Politically Incorrect: Reasons and Passions of Néstor Kirchner”), in which he reflected on the centre-left populism of the Kirchnerismo movement. The next year Fernández formed his own political party, the Labour and Equity Party (Partido del Trabajo y la Equidad), but he soon recast his lot with Sergio Massa, acting as the campaign manager for Massa’s failed run for the presidency in 2015 as the candidate of the Renewal Front. In 2017 Fernández guided former minister of the interior and transport Florencio Randazzo’s unsuccessful campaign for the Senate.

Meanwhile, Fernández and Fernández de Kirchner, who had gone some nine years without seeing each other, had a rapprochement in 2017. Then in May 2019 Fernández de Kirchner made the stunning announcement that she would not be running for president but had instead asked Fernández to do so. Suddenly the pragmatic but uncharismatic Fernández was the one in the limelight, with Fernández de Kirchner in support of him as the vice presidential candidate of FdT. By reaching out to Fernández, the former president appeared to be attempting to appeal to voters who disliked her while at the same time rallying her base. Putting his own spin on their partnership and its electoral prospects, Fernández told an interviewer, “With Cristina it’s not enough but without her it’s not possible.”

In the primary elections in August, conducted to winnow the field of candidates, Fernández beat Macri soundly, taking some 47 percent of the vote compared with 33 percent for the incumbent. With the Argentine economy struggling, Fernández pledged to reduce inflation, raise salaries, lower interest rates, renegotiate the $56 billion dollar bailout sought by Macri, and reverse the pension reform pushed through by his opponent. In the general election, in October, Fernández repeated his victory, capturing some 48 percent of the vote compared with about 40 percent for Macri (to avoid a second round runoff in an Argentine presidential election, the winning candidate must capture at least 45 percent of the vote or 40 percent of the vote plus a 10-point lead over the second-place finisher).

A music-loving guitar player, Fernández, at age 14, studied the instrument with popular Argentine rock singer-songwriter Litto Nebbia. Fernández was a fan of Bob Dylan (after whom he named his dog), poet Walt Whitman, and the Argentinos Juniors football (soccer) club. Divorced, he had an adult son, Estanislao Fernández (better known by his Instagram followers as Dyhzy), who gained notoriety as a female impersonator. Fernández’s partner and first lady was actress and journalist Fabiola Yáñez.

Fernández was inaugurated as president in December 2019. The new year brought the challenge of not only righting the Argentine economy but also leading the country’s response to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Initially, Fernández’s government was slow to respond, first questioning whether the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the infectious agent responsible for COVID-19, would even reach Argentina and then not mandating but suggesting “voluntary quarantine” measures. Eventually it imposed a strict lockdown of the economy and society that persisted as one of the world’s longest continuous preventive shutdowns, lasting more than 230 days. Despite its initial success in containing the spread of the virus, Argentina, like much of Latin America, was hit hard by the pandemic, experiencing significant spikes in infections in May 2021 and especially January 2022 (though the number of COVID-19-related deaths was higher for the earlier surge). By February 2022 about 80 percent of eligible Argentines were fully vaccinated against COVID-19, but more than 121,000 individuals had perished as a result of the disease. Fernández’s reputation was tarnished when he was fined some $24,000 for having held a birthday celebration for his wife in July 2020 in violation of his own pandemic rules against social gatherings. On the other hand, he had been able to take great satisfaction in December 2020 when the legislature legalized abortion, fulfilling one of his prime policy objectives and setting a prominent precedent for other Latin American countries.

The pandemic took a toll on the Argentine economy. GDP contracted by about 10 percent in 2020, and, though it rebounded with growth of some 10 percent in 2021, the country’s traditional bugaboo—inflation—began climbing, and poverty remained widespread. Public dissatisfaction with the economy played a big role in the ruling coalition’s dismal performance in the 2021 midterm legislative elections, in which one-third of the seats in the Senate and one-half of those in the Chamber of Deputies were contested. In going from 41 to 35 seats in the Senate after the election, FdT lost its majority in the upper house. It also dropped from 120 to 118 seats in the Chamber of Deputies but remained the largest faction in the lower house. In the meantime, fissures opened between Fernández and Fernández de Kirchner, who began publicly criticizing the president and his policies. Indeed, that growing split was said to have been responsible for the departure from the cabinet of Martín Guzmán, who, as minister of the economy, had renegotiated the country’s loan from the IMF, which was restructured as a 30-month $44 billion outlay in March 2022. Despite his differences with Fernández de Kirchner, however, the president responded to the assassination attempt against her in September 2022 by promptly addressing the nation and declaring a national holiday to allow Argentines to rally together in the wake of the disturbing incident.

In early 2022 Fernández fortified Argentina’s increasing trade and financial bonds with China by formally joining that country’s Belt and Road Initiative. In other foreign affairs, although Argentina had been pursuing a better relationship with Russia, it voted at the UN to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As 2022 progressed, however, no issue loomed larger for Fernández than Argentina’s skyrocketing inflation, which exceeded 60 percent by July.