LIKE Ségolène Royale and Hillary Clinton before her, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has set her sights on presidential power. But unlike her French and American counterparts, Kirchner faces a unique challenge in her bid to succeed her husband Nestor as president of Argentina – her fiercest rivals are also women.

The long-awaited announcement in Buenos Aires last week that Argentina’s first political couple are intending to swap roles after presidential elections in October has raised the prospect of a clash between Kirchner, the glamorous Peronist party candidate, and Elisa “Lilita” Carrio, a leftist former teenage beauty queen who is now known as “la Gorda” (the Fatty).

With the ghost of the late Eva Peron – better known as Evita – hovering over the contest, Kirchner must also contend with an outbreak of vicious sniping from another former president’s wife who ran against her in a senatorial race two years ago.

Hilda Gonzalez de Duhalde, widely known as “Chiche”, wasted no time last week in mocking the woman whose unusual political partnership with her husband could keep a Kirchner in power in Buenos Aires for the forseeable future.

“It worries me that they’ve accepted so easily that this woman is the government’s presidential candidate,” sneered Duhalde, whose husband Eduardo Duhalde ran Argentina from 2002 to 2003. “She’s very glamorous and nothing more.”

The Kirchner family’s political manoeuvrings have placed Carrio in a rare position for a western democracy. Having run unsuccessfully against Nestor Kirchner in the 2003 election, she will now be running against his wife.

Carrio warned last month: “If the Kirchners win, in four more years we won’t have a state.”

Opinion polls indicate that Kirchner will cruise to a comfortable victory on the back of her husband’s popularity, which he owes to an economy that has recovered rapidly from a debt crisis six years ago.

Yet recent provincial election results have gone against the Kirchners, suggesting that Carrio may be able to exploit a voter backlash against the murky deal-making that is apparently intended to enable Nestor and Cristina to dodge the threat of second-term voter fatigue by taking it in turns to run the country.

For all the suspicion about the couple’s ambitions, few doubt that Kirchner, 54, is qualified to become president. Married to her husband for 32 years, she has been a congresswoman and a senator from their home province of Santa Cruz in Patagonia.

In the 1990s she distinguished herself with her staunch opposition to the conservative government of former president Carlos Menem, which became mired in corruption allegations. More recently, as chairwoman of a key constitutional committee, she helped push her husband’s reforms through Congress.

A skilled debater, she is none-theless a remote figure who disdains the media and has a reputation for being a control freak. She demands that she only be offered a certain brand of bottled water and has refused to be photographed against backdrops she did not like.

Her personal style, notably her enthusiasm for heavy mascara and designer accessories, is endlessly analysed in the Argentine media and, although she spent much of this year polishing her foreign policy credentials with visits to France, Mexico and the United States, she has been careful not to upstage her husband at home. The Argentine historian Carolina Barros recently called her “a strongman in a skirt”.

While Kirchner attempts to exude the jewelled glamour that made Evita loved by the Peronist masses, Carrio could scarcely be less glamorous. The local media have long been fascinated by Lil-ita’s disregard for beauty products and her expansive waistline.

“I used to be thin and beautiful,” Carrio said before the 2003 election. “But when I started eating what I felt like eating and wearing what I felt like wearing, it made me happier. I don’t use make-up or buy lots of clothes any more, and I don’t miss it at all.” Photographs posted on Carrio’s website suggest she is prepared to make more of an effort these days, but she remains a distinct outsider in a country that has always worshipped glamour.

A 51-year-old political science professor and twice-divorced mother of three children, Carrio sprang to national prominence in the economic crisis of 2001, becoming a spokeswoman for outraged Argentinians whose life savings had become worthless.

She briefly led the opinion polls for the 2003 election, but by election day the antigovernment anger expressed in her slogan “Get rid of all of them” had begun to subside. She was soundly beaten by Nestor Kirchner, who had proved a capable provincial governor and could also claim to be an outsider.

Virtually alone among the women at the top of Argentine politics, Carrio makes no claim to Evita’s legacy. She acknowledges Peron’s formidable political influence but claims the wife of the late strongman Juan Peron has been “trivialised” by those who seek to emulate her.

Kirchner may well be next in line for power at the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, but if Carrio has anything to do with it, her ride there will not be comfortable.

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