Cristina Kirchner: she's not just another Evita

She dismisses Britain as "a coarse and decadent colonial power" and has turned Argentina's once almost forgotten dispute with London over the Falkland Islands into a cornerstone of national policy, vowing to "continue battling tirelessly to gain recognition of what is already [Argentina's] sovereign right over those islands".

To her diminishing circle of critics, once numerous and vociferous but now humbled by the stunning 54% victory that ushered President Cristina Kirchner into a second term of office two months ago, those words might sound like populist hyperbole leading up to the 30th anniversary of the Falklands war. But Kirchner's passionate verbal forays against perceived foes abroad and at home are seldom just political vapour. She almost always manages to pack potent bite into them.

"I know we will recover what is ours hand in hand with South America, hand in hand with Latin America and hand in hand with our brothers who fully support us in the struggle against colonialism," Kirchner said last year in a passionate speech about the islands that Argentina claims as "Las Malvinas".

The paen to South American unity became hard political fact when Argentina, Brazil and Chile, among others, agreed in December to start blocking Falklands-flagged ships from entering their ports. Together with the threat of suspending the only commercial flight linking Port Stanley with the continental mainland , Kirchner might be on the brink of completely isolating the Falklands from South America.

Comparisons with "Evita," the second wife of Peronist party founder Juan Perón are inevitable. Like Eva Duarte, who died of cancer in 1952 at the age of 33, Kirchner enjoys first-name recognition throughout Argentina simply as Cristina. Her legions of supporters proudly call themselves "Cristinistas".

The massive popularity she enjoys is also partly based on angry tirades against the country's privileged class, a derided clan that today encompasses the corporations that Cristina accuses of squirrelling profits abroad instead of investing them in Argentina.

And like Evita, President Kirchner has addressed the real problems of the working class, launching a universal child benefit plan that has boosted school attendance and reduced poverty, upping pension benefits for the elderly, while at the same time managing to keep the economy strong despite the economic crisis in Europe and America.

Blessed with sharp political instincts, a direct connection with her constituents, a quick brain and proud good looks, Kirchner, 58, entered politics with the Peronist Youth of the 1970s, rising to senator in the 1990s before being elected president in 2007. She is not ashamed of working hard to maintain her looks. "I have painted myself like I was a door since I was 14," she has confessed.

Completing the parallels with the founding couple of Peronism, Kirchner formed a tight political alliance with her husband and law-school sweetheart, Néstor Kirchner, that remained unbroken from their marriage in 1975 to his "dark horse" presidential election in 2003 through to his sudden death in 2010. The massive outpouring of sympathy for the suddenly widowed president finally cemented an emotional bond with the people unseen since the days of Evita.

Shrill of voice with a tendency to sermonise on national broadcast television and possessing a confrontational style that brooks no opposition, Kirchner has survived massive personal and political setbacks from the unexpected death of her husband, a political mastermind who continued micromanaging Argentina behind the scenes even after she had taken office, to the economic downturn combined with a farmers' revolt three years ago that threatened her presidency.

The soy-fuelled export boom partly responsible for nine years of uninterrupted growth under the Kirchner period has been a key to her survival. But another factor behind her popularity is that Cristina is Perón and his wife wrapped in a single package. Evita had the heart, but not the power, something that Cristina enjoys in plenty.

"Cristina is more powerful than Perón ever was," says Carlos Corach, interior minister during the 10-year government of Peronist former president Carlos Menem during the 1990s. "I would dare say she is the most powerful president in the history of Argentina."

Indeed, the near-dematerialisation of political opposition since she took office is perhaps worrying. In last year's presidential elections, her nearest rival, 68-year-old socialist Hermes Binner, came in 37 points behind with a paltry 17% of the vote. With the Peronists in power for 20 of the 29 years since the return of democracy in 1983 a single-party scenario seems possible.

President Kirchner's fighting spirit is not reserved for David Cameron alone (she once lambasted Cameron's rebuttal of Argentina's Malvinas claim as "mediocre or stupid"). At the start of her first presidency, she began a similar war of words against the opposition newspaper Clarín, suggesting it had ganged up with the nation's farm-owning establishment to plot a coup.

The flagship of a multimedia conglomerate that includes the country's biggest network TV station, a major cable company and internet service provider, as well as being the largest-circulation Spanish-language newspaper in the world, Clarín continued publishing hard-hitting investigations into corruption and strong opinion columns questioning Kirchner's perceived authoritarian excesses.

Clarín may have miscalculated its adversary, for Argentina's first elected woman president put iron in her punch in the shape of a media law that will soon force Clarín to divest itself of part of its cable and internet services plus a newsprint law that places paper production at the Papel Prensa company Clarín partly owns under government control.

Her critics rightly point out the authoritarian streak suggested by her penchant to rule through a tight circle of intimate advisers as well as her almost despotic attitude towards the independent press, whose journalists are continually blasted by the state-owned media. But it is also true to say that newspapers such as Clarín have been merciless in their attempts to ridicule the president, labelling her Argentina's "Botox Queen" and going out of their way to publish unflattering pictures of her. Her recent thyroid operation is a case in point. After being diagnosed with thyroid cancer in late December, Kirchner went into hospital four weeks ago for the removal of her thyroid gland. She had taken the bad news bravely and appeared composed announcing the news to the nation, even jokingly warning her vice-president Amado Boudou: "Be careful what you do" while she was on sick leave.

But when the unexpected news came that there had been a misdiagnosis , the opposition press had a field day. Rumours circulated that the cancer diagnosis was a cover for plastic surgery or that the misdiagnosis had resulted from the fear that the president was said to instil even in her medical team.

Not averse to melodrama, when she reappeared in public 12 days ago, apart from taking advantage of the occasion to chastise Britain for "depleting our national resources, our oil and our fishery" in the South Atlantic, President Kirchner wore a dress that revealed the scar left by the operation. "I was going to wear a scarf because it doesn't look too aesthetic," Kirchner said as she pushed her hair aside so photographers could get a full view. "But then I thought, if I wear a scarf Clarín tomorrow would say there was no operation. You all know how easily I succumb to aesthetics, but I said, 'Darling, politics before aesthetics.'"

It was a gesture that probably won her more public sympathy than disapprobation and it was in response to a pitiless press that has repeatedly misjudged the close rapport between Cristina and an overwhelming majority of voters.

Entering her second term in office, which by the current constitution is her last, while also the third consecutive term of the now single-wheeled Kirchner tandem, it is that bond with her supporters that gives hope to those who wish her to remain beyond 2015 and alarms those who see democracy weakened by such a possibility.

"Argentina has found a leader who is much more than a president and this doesn't happen very often," said Vice-President Boudou, who has been proposing a constitutional reform to allow Kirchner a third term.

"We need another four years to keep pushing the measures to keep transforming Argentina."

Although every Peronist president from Juan Perón himself in the 1950s to President Menem in the 1990s sought a third term, none has achieved it so far. If she can manage some kind of victory with Britain over the Falklands, President Kirchner may yet become the first Peronist to break that three-term barrier.