Former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner told The Washington Post that she does not rule out running for president again in 2027 if her political rights are restored, in an interview published Monday.
Kirchner cannot run today. Her six-year sentence in the Vialidad public-works fraud case includes a lifetime ban from public office, and she is serving it under house arrest in her Buenos Aires apartment. She denies wrongdoing and, in the interview, called the Argentine judicial system corrupt, saying that if she had stolen money she would be free because she could have bought the courts.
Her lawyers, led by Brazilian jurist Rafael Valim, who also helped defend Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have taken her case to the UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva, which oversees an international treaty on civil and political rights. They argue her trial violated her right to due process. The committee cannot overturn a national court’s verdict, and in a reply to a press query last week it said a decision on whether to take up the case, and on its merits, usually takes several years and is not imminent.
Her camp is counting on a quicker step, an interim measure. Before ruling on a case, the committee can ask a government to act to prevent irreparable harm to the person who complained, and UN guidance says it treats a state’s failure to comply as a breach of its obligations under the treaty. Her lawyers want one that would suspend the lifetime ban and review the terms of her house arrest, among other requests, and people close to her say a decision could come at any time. Valim argues that Argentina’s human rights record makes compliance more likely, while people around President Milei say a favorable decision would not be binding.
Kirchner heads the Justicialist Party, the main Peronist party, and her remarks drew a first reaction from the camp of Buenos Aires Governor Axel Kicillof, another Peronist seen as a possible presidential candidate. Asked about them at a press conference on Monday, Carlos Bianco, the provincial government minister, said that if the compulsory open primaries are kept, each Peronist faction will put forward candidates and “the Peronist people will decide who represents them as a presidential candidate.”
Kirchner also predicted that President Trump and the Republicans will lose the US midterm elections on Tuesday. Trump, she said, has done everything possible to help right-wing governments win in Latin America, yet will lose in his own country.
