According to the latest official results published Monday. Mrs Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has succeed her husband Nestor Kirchner and become Argentina’s first elected female president. Mrs. Kirchner, 54, the center-left Peronist party candidate and a senator, defeated a fractured opposition and avoided a runoff. With 96 percent of the voting locations reporting, Mrs. Kirchner had 45 percent. More than anything, Mrs. Kirchner’s victory would serve as a referendum on the four years under her husband, who steered Argentina out of its worst economic crisis in 2001, when it defaulted on $80 billion in loans. In her victory speech, she urged the whole society to work together without rancour and hatred. A country, she said, could not be built by a government alone. She promised a battle without respite against poverty and unemployment.

The first lady will formally announce her candidacy on July 19 in her home city of La Plata, capital of Buenos Aires province, the cabinet chief, Alberto Fernández, told the state news agency, Telam. The interior minister, Aníbal Fernández, said Mrs Kirchner was the most qualified candidate and would “deepen change”. Mrs Kirchner, a lawyer who worked her way up the party ranks, was first elected to the senate in 1995. She established herself as a formidable political operator and helped her husband, whom she met at law school, to rise to the top.

In contrast to her blunt and often dour husband, who won the presidency in 2003, the first lady is seen as a more glamorous, worldly figure who can mix as easily with foreign leaders as with grassroot Perónists. Recent trips to France, Venezuela, Mexico and other countries were seen as an effort to groom that image. Some analysts say that beneath the polish she is more ideological and radical than her pragmatist partner. An effective speaker and popular with the poor as well as the middle class, she is more conventional than Evita, the actress from humble origins whose personality cult produced the title “spiritual leader of the nation” as well as a musical.