Argentina’s president never appears in public without a heavy layer of make-up. “I put it on like I am painting a door,” she told her authorised biographer, Sandra Russo. Indeed, Russo’s book dedicates a whole chapter to the subject that many believe holds the key to who Cristina Fernández really is. One western diplomat in Buenos Aires – a woman – told me: “She really is beautiful when you meet her close up, and she is intelligent.” Her critics question her political credentials behind the mask. “Cristina uses her femininity, defends the feminist cause, but her politics are male. She concentrates power and is extremely narcissistic and authoritarian,” says Maria Laura Avignolo of the Argentine opposition newspaper Clarin.
To her supporters, the dark eye shadow and glossy lipstick, varnished nails, designer dresses and high heels show that Fernández, now 59, has not allowed nearly five years of power to dilute the femininity and discreet coquetry that (according to the nuns who educated her) has characterised her since her school days. In other words, she remains human, defining her womanhood on her own terms in a world where men still stoop to conquer. “I like to seduce. I don’t want people to just obey me. I want to convince them,” she told one of her closes
