Evita legacy helps Argentine first lady's campaign

BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentina's legendary first lady Eva Peron died more than 50 years ago but she is still a force in this year's presidential election.

Many Argentines admire "Evita," the wife of former President Juan Peron, for helping women get the vote, winning labor benefits for miners and meat packers, and founding hospitals and orphanages.

The lingering fervor over an elegant first lady of yesteryear has quietly helped the presidential campaign of today's first lady Sen. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, a lifelong Peronist.

Polls show Fernandez will win the October 28 election with the bulk of her support in poor and working class neighborhoods that are strongly Peronist and where the cult of Evita persists even though few people under the age of 65 can actually remember her.

Fernandez, 54, was born a year after Evita died and has led a very different life, but her followers see similarities.

"She reminds me a lot of Evita. Her power, her conviction, the way she uses words. She's so smart. I admire her," said 72-year-old Norma, who declined to give her last name, at a recent campaign rally in the Peronist stronghold of Matanza outside Buenos Aires.

Some supporters are thrilled that a woman is now leading the Peronist movement and hope she will carry on Evita's work.

"When I was little I lived the Evita era, now I'm living Cristina's era," Norma said.

Fernandez is careful to limit references to Evita, whose nationalist speeches and emotional appeals to workers -- her "shirtless ones" -- are a turnoff for the middle class Argentines that Fernandez has struggled to win over.

"Evita did a lot of damage by turning Peronism into fanaticism. Her intolerance with everything not Peronist is her legacy and it's a bad legacy," said historian Felix Luna.

MILITANT, NOT FAIRY GODMOTHER

Fernandez's slick campaign video shows a few images of Evita, and she says she likes to remember her not as a fairy godmother who founded hospitals and gave gifts to children, but as a militant who fought for social justice.

"The Evita of my youth stood with her hand raised before the microphone, flamboyant, announcing battles of the people and for the people," Fernandez said at a homage to Eva Peron on the 55th anniversary of her death in July.

Evita would be very proud that Argentina's first woman president will be a Peronist, says Cristina Alvarez, Evita's great-niece, president ad honorem of the Evita Institute and a Peronist congresswoman.

"Comparisons are unavoidable when you have such an important figure as Eva in the past, and especially since they are both Peronists. But they are very different. Cristina is an intellectual from an academic background ... Eva had intuition and a big heart," Alvarez said.

Political analyst Graciela Romer said Evita was always careful to take a back seat to Juan Peron, specifically turning down a call from unions for her to run for office.

In contrast, Fernandez has had a long political partnership with her husband President Nestor Kirchner. He is popular and would almost certainly have won re-election but instead stood aside for his wife to take over.

Evita did not study beyond elementary school, worked as an actress and in radio, and died of cervical cancer at age 33. Her early death at the height of her popularity cemented her iconic status in Argentina.

Fernandez, a lawyer, has dedicated her life to politics, from her days as a student activist to years in the Senate.

Despite their different backgrounds, both are powerful speakers and sharp dressers.

Evita raising her hands at the microphone, with her blonde hair drawn back into a chignon, addressing huge rallies is an image that helped inspire the 1970s musical based on her life by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber. The show was later made into a movie starring Madonna.

Fernandez says she first became aware of Evita from a book her grandfather kept hidden in the 1960s when Juan Peron was in exile. At the time, Evita's homes for single mothers and poor children were shut down, and military leaders banned Peronism, even declaring it illegal to say the former president's name.

Fernandez and her husband belonged to the Peronist youth in the 1970s and were part of a large movement that brought Juan Peron out of exile in Spain and back into power in Argentina.

(Additional reporting by Katie Paul, Kevin Gray and Helen Popper)