What is a Supreme Court for?

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was a fading political star long before Argentina’s Supreme Court confirmed her conviction sentence this week, which throws her into jail (at home) and bans her from serving office ever again. Now, she starts a new chapter of her (political) life – one in which she might stage an unexpected comeback.

Kirchnerite dominance in Argentina lasted for 20 years: from 2003, when her late husband Néstor Kirchner was elected president, to November 2023, when the coalition she assembled,  Unión por la Patria, suffered a humiliating defeat to a Mr. Nobody like Javier Milei. She departed office with a failed government she built with Alberto Fernández as president.

The peak of her power was 2011, when she won re-election with an astounding 54 percent of the votes in the first round and dwarfed all opposition. Since then, it has all been downhill. In 2013, her ruling party was challenged and defeated in the midterms by dissident Peronist Sergio Massa; in 2015, she had to endorse for succession a candidate she did not like, Daniel Scioli, who nevertheless lost to Mauricio Macri; in 2017, she lost the Buenos Aires Province senatorial race to Macri’s candidate Esteban Bullrich. In 2019, she handpicked Alberto Fernández to beat an unpopular Macri re-election attempt and won the vice-presidency, a brief bright moment, but the Fernández administration was a political mess that ended with an annual inflation rate of 200 percent.

Now, in 2025, she has failed to align with her main political protégé, Buenos Aires Province Governor Axel Kicillof, instead announcing she would fight for her political survival by seeking an obscure seat in the provincial legislature – until the Supreme Court chipped in.

President Milei was right when he said that his goal was to “beat Kirchner at the polls” to “put the final nail in her coffin.” Wordy and insulting as he frequently is, there is some sound political logic to his desire. No matter how slight, the chance of a Kirchnerite comeback would have bolstered Milei’s popularity (plus market adoration) among those who have come to believe she is the source of all the country’s ills.

Fernández de Kirchner’s arrest will unfalteringly construct another item of irreducible confrontation for Argentine politics. The former president will either be seen as the victim of political persecution – so typical of the Peronist narrative since the party’s foundations in the 1940s – or as a symbol of unprecedented corruption who deserves to rot in jail, a fate which usually only applies to Peronists.

Little good can come out of that. Argentina already suffers from too much lack of consensus on issues that are crucial to making the country work. The economy is, of course, one of them: populists on the left like Fernández de Kirchner seek to solve the country’s problems by printing pesos and giving them away, which causes inflation; populists on the right like Milei (and his wannabe political ally, former president Mauricio Macri) give away cheap US dollars, which causes debt. The two schemes crash against a bottleneck, sooner than later.

This means each camp can perfectly predict how – though not when – the other camp will fail. This is what Fernández de Kirchner did in her conviction speech on Tuesday. “This is the chronicle of a death foretold,” she said, referencing the famous Gabriel García Márquez novel. “There is no happy ending here.” She spoke about cheap dollars, growing debt and likened it to other similar episodes in the country’s history. 

With Fernández de Kirchner in jail and banned, the next intractable debate will be about whether Argentina’s elections are fully democratic. Every time the issue comes up, she will be in the spotlight. If Milei’s economic programme does not do well, as the former president predicts, she might be the first image that comes to many people’s minds.

Argentina’s courts, including the Supreme Court, are not exemplary enough to dispel suspicion about their actions. Examples abound everywhere: only recently, a judge from San Isidro named Julieta Makintash – who was part of a three-handed court handling the high-profile trial into the death of Diego Maradona – was caught breaking the rules to film a documentary about her role in the case. The trial was called off and faces a retrial.

The three-member Supreme Court, with two vacancies, threw out Fernández de Kirchner’s appeal on the thin argument that she did not have enough grounds to deserve it. It is difficult not to wonder: if a country’s Supreme Court does not do some work every once in a while and review a case involving the political rights of the nation’s main opposition leader, what is a Supreme Court for?