Do we like them?

Do we like Cristina Fernández de Kirchner?

Our score: 5 out of 10. A real rights record on one side, a final conviction and unfinished trials on the other, so it lands in the middle.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is a former president of Argentina and still the centre of gravity of Peronism. These days she is serving a six-year sentence at home with an ankle monitor, after the Supreme Court upheld her conviction in June 2025. The same ruling bars her from public office for life.

The conviction is for fraudulent administration in the Vialidad case. The court threw out the criminal association charge prosecutors wanted. She has called the justices “a triumvirate of the unacceptable”, and her movement calls it political proscription. A pardon would imply guilt, which she has always rejected. In April 2026 an appeals court also upheld the confiscation of her assets over a damages order of about US$500 million.

The bigger stoush is the Cuadernos trial, where she is one of about 80 defendants in a bribery case built on a driver's notebooks. Prosecutors allege a bribery scheme. She says the case rests on “repentant” witnesses who were extorted, and she has called them “extorsionados”. Several business figures have told the court they lied to win repentant status, and the original notebooks have never been put on file. No verdict yet, so it stays alleged.

Then there's the Iran memorandum case. A court dismissed it in 2021, finding the deal was not a crime and no cover-up was proven. That ruling was later reversed, and the Supreme Court sent her to trial in December 2024. I couldn't find a trial date, and she denies the accusations.

On the harm test, she comes out clean on what I could find. She signed the 2010 marriage equality law, which made Argentina the first country in Latin America to allow same-sex marriage. I found no harmful words about LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate. But I didn't turn up much either way on women or climate, so that's a gap, not a gold star.

Where you land depends on how you read the courts. Her supporters say a hostile judiciary is hunting a Peronist leader. Her critics say a final Supreme Court ruling is a final ruling. The good-person test is a close call because both stories have real evidence behind them.