ARGENTINA:In a historic vote, Argentina has elected its first lady to succeed President Néstor Kirchner.
Senator Cristina Fernández Kirchner becomes the first woman to be elected president of the South American country and when her husband places the sash of office on her shoulder on December 10th she will be the first woman anywhere to succeed her spouse after a democratic vote.
As expected Mrs Kirchner won easily in Sunday's poll taking almost 45 per cent of the vote and leading her nearest rival by more than 20 points, so avoiding the need for a run-off round. In a victory speech before supporters in a Buenos Aires hotel she said she felt "added responsibility" because of the margin of victory and as the country's first woman elected president.
The Kirchners are members of the country's Peronist Party, a populist movement founded by the dictator Juan Peron, which is the country's biggest political force. In the 1970s Peron's third wife briefly succeeded him as president following his death in office, before being ousted in a military coup in 1976.
Sunday's vote was marked by queues and confusion at polling booths in the most chaotically organised election since the return to democracy in 1983.
Most delays took place in the big cities where the greatest opposition to the Kirchners is located. Opposition parties denounced cases of fraud and widespread irregularities but accepted these would not affect the national outcome.
After an apathetic campaign in which Mrs Kirchner largely refused to participate, ignoring the press and refusing to debate with her rivals, turnout was the lowest since 1928 in a country where voting is compulsory.
As well as her personal triumph Mrs Kirchner saw her coalition increase its control over the already docile congress and win all eight of the gubernatorial races also held on Sunday.
Nineteen of Argentina's 23 provinces are now in the hands of Kirchner allies. In the Peronist bastion of Buenos Aires province, home to a third of all electors and a traditional centre of vote buying and fraud, Mr Kirchner's vice-president was elected governor by a margin of more than 30 per cent.
The only significant districts not to vote for Mrs Kirchner were the province of Cordoba, and the capital of Buenos Aires, which has never voted for Kirchner administration candidates. Yesterday the couple's cabinet chief and principal spokesman, Alberto Fernández, taunted the city's voters, home to the country's most well-off and educated people, saying that the city should "be part of the country and stop thinking and voting like an island". Mrs Kirchner ran on the record of her husband's administration, of which she was an integral part. Since the economic crash of 2001 it has overseen five years of 8 per cent growth, created millions of jobs and slashed poverty rates.
That rosy picture is threatened by spiralling inflation and the need for new foreign investment in an industrial sector that is already at maximum capacity, but the opposition never convinced voters it was ready to confront these challenges any better than the administration.
It is not expected that Mrs Kirchner will make many changes to her husband's ministerial team but her refusal to outline a vision for her presidency during the campaign means no one knows for sure exactly what it will look like. Her keen interest in foreign affairs - almost completely ignored by her husband - means she may be more willing to undertake the diplomatic legwork necessary to reinsert Argentina into the global financial system, from which it has been suspended since the debt default of 2001.
Whatever changes Mrs Kirchner does introduce it is thought unlikely that she will give up the so-called "superpowers" her husband inherited on taking office and used to create the strongest presidency in recent Argentine history.
These superpowers were voted in at the height of the crisis and though the Kirchners trumpet their success in dragging the country back from the brink, they have never discussed giving them up.
Holding on to them, and their ability to dominate congress and provincial governments, will make it all the more difficult for the opposition to build a credible alternative in time for the election in 2011.