Argentina President recovering from brain surgery Cristina Fernández brain surgery adds to political woes
Amid falling popularity, Argentinian president's haemotoma operation falls during run-up to midterm legislative elections
Uki Goñi in Buenos Aires
theguardian.com, Tuesday 8 October 2013 11.35 EDT
A man waves a flag with a picture of Argentina's president, Cristina Fernández, and her late husband, Nestor Kirchner, outside the hospital in Buenos Aires where she was having brain surgery. Photograph: Marcos Brindicci/Reuters
With inflation rising and her popularity in decline, the troubles of Argentina's once all-powerful president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, have been compounded by the unforeseen hurdle of emergency surgery on a brain haematoma, a procedure that could require her to relinquish office for 30 days of bed rest.
The governor for Buenos Aires, Daniel Scioli, announced on Tuesday night: "The president has come out of surgery and is recovering from anesthesia.
"If God desires it, she's going to be back with us very soon, fully functioning."
Argentina's presidential spokesman said later that Fernandez was in good spirits following the successful operation to remove fluid from the surface of her brain.
The president's haematoma – blood accumulated under a membrane that covers the brain – was caused when she tripped and bumped her head while going down the stepladder of the presidential jet in early August, her arms loaded with presents for her newborn grandson.
While the 60-year-old president has undergone extensive cosmetic procedures in the past, the urgent operation has fallen in the runup to mid-term legislative elections on 27 October. Polls predict that her Victory Front (Frente Para la Victoria) party, the leftwing branch of the splintered Peronist movement, will lose considerable ground to rival candidates from Peronist centre-right parties.
Chief among the breakway "Kirchneristas" threatening to dent the president's Congress majority is Sergio Massa, the ambitious and popular mayor of the Buenos Aires suburb of Tigre. Once Fernández's trusted adviser, Massa is now a leading contender to win the presidency in 2015 and considered a traitor by the ailing president.
"Massa is not one of us," Fernández said in a recent interview. "If he isn't the opposition, then I am the Mona Lisa and would be in the Louvre."
Fernández was angry at Massa's campaign promise to continue applying her brand of populist economics if he gains the presidency. "I don't like people who disguise themselves saying they would continue with the good things and change the bad," Fernández said.
A bad result in this month's elections would dash her party's dream of an "eternal Cristina", cutting the majority the party had hoped would allow it to change the constitution to enable Fernández to seek a third consecutive term in office in 2015.
However, even the president's most bitter critics offered their support as she prepared for the operation.
"Irrespective of our differences, we wish Argentine president Kirchner well and hope that her surgery goes well," read a tweet from the popular Falkland Islands user @Falklands_utd, with the hashtag #HumanityFirst.
Fernández has made Argentina's historic claim over the Falklands a cornerstone of her government policy, prohibiting British cruise ships from docking at Argentina's southern ports and threatening sanctions against foreign companies exploring for oil around the disputed South Atlantic islands.
A trouncing at the polls could mark an end to the "K years" – the decade-long rule of Argentina by Fernández and her husband, Néstor Kirchner, who revived Argentina's troubled economy when elected to office in 2003, before stepping aside to let his wife succeed him in 2007.
Néstor Kirchner's economic strategies – which saw Argentina break with the IMF and introduce a series of populist measures – brought Argentina back from the brink of chaos after the country defaulted on its foreign debt in 2002.
But with the economy failing since Kirchner's sudden death of a heart attack in 2010 and the current president's drop in popularity in opinion polls, her current health setback has cast doubt over the ability of her administration to recover before the presidential elections.