Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner lost power in Congress after voters angry at her handling of a farm strike, crime and a slowing economy favored opposition candidates in mid-term elections Sunday.

Partial results indicated the government would lose its majority in both houses of congress, with no party having outright control.
A slate of candidates for the lower house led by Nestor Kirchner, Fernandez’s husband and predecessor, was behind in Buenos Aires province, home to 38 percent of voters, the interior ministry reported.
“We’ve said a number of times that we are going to change history, and that day is today,” Buenos Aires province opposition leader Francisco de Narvaez said at a rally last night. “This is a moment to unite, not divide, a moment to join together, not confront.”
De Narvaez’s slate had 34.6 percent support compared with Kirchner’s 32.2 percent with 53 percent of the votes counted. The ruling coalition was also trailing in populous provinces including Cordoba and Mendoza and in Buenos Aires city. In Kirchner’s home province of Santa Cruz, government candidates were losing by 1,700 votes with 71 percent of ballots counted.
Fernandez, 56, relied on her coalition’s control of congress to back an agenda that included nationalizing $24 billion in private pension funds and the country’s flagship airline, Aerolineas Argentinas SA. She angered many supporters when she tried to raise farm export taxes last year, provoking four months of road blockades and protests.
Fernandez, who succeeded her husband in December 2007, got congress to move up yesterday’s election by four months, arguing it would be “suicidal” to let the campaign drag on while “the world is crumbling into pieces” as a result of the global economic crisis. Opposition leaders said the intent was to hold the vote before the Argentines felt the full effects of the crisis.
Kirchner, 59, said the country’s economic growth since a 2001 financial crisis was at risk in the mid-term election. He reminded voters that in 2001, when Argentina defaulted on $95 billion of debt and restricted bank withdrawals, then-President Fernando de la Rua was forced to resign amid riots and looting. The following year, the economy shrank almost 11 percent.
“This is not just another legislative election, there are two different models for the country at stake,” Kirchner said at a rally on June 17. “We don’t want more frozen bank accounts, more financial instability, more unemployed people, more broken industries. This economic model should be a breaking point between the old Argentina and the new one.”
The farm strike did more damage to Fernandez than the country’s slowing economy or rising concerns about crime, an issue that de Narvaez campaigned on, pollster Ricardo Rouvier said in a June 24 interview.
Economic growth in Argentina slowed last year to 6.8 percent from an annual average of 8.8 percent during Kirchner’s four-year term. Inflation quickened to what private economists such as Jose Luis Blanco, at Tendencias Economicas research, estimate at 22 percent.
Argentina’s dependence on agricultural commodity exports such as soybeans and wheat has hurt it over the past year as international prices fell from record highs and the global economic crisis hit. Exports fell 18 percent to $5.1 billion in May from a year earlier, while imports declined 49 percent to $2.7 billion.
Fernandez has vowed that the economy will continue to grow even as organizations including the International Monetary Fund predict a recession. The economy will shrink three percent this year, according to the median estimate of seven economists surveyed by Bloomberg.
Neil Shearing, an emerging markets economist at Capital Economics Ltd in London, said the government may react to its defeat by boosting spending on social programs in an effort to build support ahead of the 2011 presidential elections.
“The government will be desperately scrambling for a way to regain authority and will probably try to do that through populist measures,” Shearing said in a telephone interview.
(Source: Bloomberg)