KEY POINTS:
Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has won Argentina's election to become the country's first elected woman president.
A poll aired by several television channels showed Fernandez, a center-leftist senator, with 42 per cent to 46 per cent of the vote, well ahead of her nearest rival, former lawmaker Elisa
Carrio with 23 per cent to 25 per cent.
If the official tally confirms that Fernandez has more than 45 per cent of the vote, or 40 per cent with a 10 percentage point lead over Carrio, she will win the presidency without facing a runoff election next month.
Fernandez, 54, ran on the record of her husband, leftist President Nestor Kirchner, and she would take over from him in a highly unusual transfer of power between democratically elected spouses.
Many Argentines credit Kirchner with pulling the country out of a dramatic economic crisis in 2001-02 and using growth of 8 per cent a year to create jobs, raise salaries and expand pension benefits.
"There are more jobs now. Things have calmed down. People aren't dying to leave the country," said Sergio Arrigoni, 41, a delivery truck driver recalling the hundreds of thousands of Argentines who fled the country at the height of the crisis.
Fernandez has been Kirchner's top advisor during his four-year presidency. Voters tired of boom-and-bust cycles hope she will sustain the bonanza he has overseen, even as high inflation and energy shortages cause concern.
Argentina, a major grains exporter and producer of beef on its huge pampas grasslands, is South America's second biggest country and historically one of its wealthiest.
Earlier in the day, Fernandez voted in a school in Rio Gallegos in southern Patagonia, Kirchner's hometown and her adopted homeland.
"I'm part of the generation that grew up and couldn't vote for anything," she said, referring to Argentina's 1976-83 military dictatorship.
Argentina had its only other woman president in the mid-1970s when Isabel Peron took power after the death of her husband, strongman leader Juan Peron, but she was not elected to the job.
A Fernandez victory would make her the second woman elected president in a Latin America country in the last two years, coming after Chile's Michelle Bachelet won office.
It would also continue the trend of leftist leadership in South America. But while Fernandez is expected to stay friendly with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, she, like her husband, is more moderate than the firebrand socialist.
Her campaign seemed effortless. Handpicked by her husband and chosen by a faction of the Peronist party without a primary, Fernandez avoided debates and was vague on policy.
Rivals have criticised the Kirchners as being authoritarian and treating the election as the beginning of a political dynasty to tighten their grip on the presidency and Congress.
- Reuters
