Kirchner’s excessive maquillage may appear to have little to do with crude oil in the Falklands’ disputed waters. Yet to many Argentinians there was something distasteful about their 57-year-old head of state posing as a diva on the world stage, enhanced by designer suits, stiletto heels and — it is rumoured — cosmetic surgery, while thousands of poor people were camping out in the cities to protest at their lack of jobs and welfare.

The perceived aloofness of “Queen Cristina” — another nickname is “the Botox president” — was highlighted in the Argentine media during her trip to Mexico last week, when Kirchner’s extravagant demands surpassed those of the singer Beyoncé, according to the newspaper Perfil. A hotel in Cancun had to take on extra staff to cater exclusively to the president’s requirements.

These reportedly included the provision of a running machine, a massage table, a yoga carpet, fitness weights and special meals augmented by a constant supply of chocolates to her suite. The cost is unknown but in 2008 she ran up a hotel bill of $111,000 (£73,000) when she and her 20-strong entourage stayed at New York’s Four Seasons hotel during a United Nations summit. She prefers to travel by private jet, despite having four presidential jets and a helicopter at her disposal.

“She is seen as arrogant and hypocritical, detached from the harsh realities of Argentine life,” said a local journalist. “The middle class wince at the sight of her at the dispatch box, swinging her Gucci bag and brushing back her lustrous hair extensions as she pontificates on poverty and how the rich ruined the country.”

To her detractors Kirchner has ruthlessly appropriated the image of Eva Peron, the wife of President Juan Domingo Peron who cast herself as the saviour of the nation’s poor. Like Evita, Cristina shakes her fist during speeches and, on the rare occasions when she ventures into the country’s desperate barrios, whips up crowds with the rhetoric of solidarity.

Kirchner first stepped up Argentine claims to the islands on the 26th anniversary of the Falklands war in April 2008, when she denounced “the shameful presence of a colonial enclave in the 21st century”. Recent tensions between Argentina and Britain rose to their highest level in almost three decades with the arrival in the Falklands of a British oil rig that began drilling last week in the hope of finding substantial oil and gas reserves beneath the sea bed.

The president’s recent diplomatic campaign has reaped rewards, with 32 Latin American and Caribbean heads of state backing Argentina’s claim to sovereignty. Although Kirchner failed to secure anything other than acknowledgment of Argentina’s concerns at the UN, she is pinning her hopes on a meeting tomorrow with Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state. America, which provided vital intelligence to Britain in the 1982 conflict, has indicated that it will remain studiedly neutral.

Kirchner’s efforts abroad have cut little ice with many Argentinians, who see the campaign as a distraction from problems at home. Isolated, with her popularity at an all-time low and speculation rife about a devaluation of the Argentine peso, her Malvinas rallying cry looks like a desperate throw of the dice before she faces an election next year.

Back in 2007 it had all seemed so different. Borne by a landslide into the Casa Rosada, the pink presidential palace, as Argentina’s first democratically elected woman president, Queen Cristina was showered with silver confetti as she prepared to succeed her husband as president. Nestor Kirchner was stepping down after his second term and the first couple sealed their job swap with a kiss. Although Nestor had turned round Argentina’s shattered economy, he feared the country’s notoriously swift voter fatigue and his wife was able to take the reins of power almost unchallenged.

Nestor is still widely believed to be the country’s true ruler, exercising power behind the scenes and aiming to take over from his wife next year. Ironically, when president he was accused of relying too much on Cristina, an experienced senator who cultivated a more scholarly image and was thought to have written his speeches.

She retorted ambiguously: “I’m the last person he sees before going to bed.”

Among Cristina’s nicknames is one she bestowed on herself: La Pinguina (The Lady Penguin), after the inhabitants of Antarctica, opposite the Kirchners’ traditional power base at the southernmost tip of Argentina. Her husband is also known as Penguin, after his southern roots and prominent nose. Wags say they are imitating the role-reversal behaviour of emperor penguins, when the female goes out to sea in search of food while the male stays behind to incubate their egg.

Cristina’s dramatic makeover on assuming the presidency, dressing in Versace and Gucci outfits, was seen initially as a welcome sign of Argentina’s recovering economic confidence. “Even talk of her collagen implants, Botox treatments and cosmetic surgery did not go down too badly in a country where cosmetic surgery is relatively cheap and thought to be desirable,” said a foreign correspondent.

In hard times, however, she has proved to be no Evita. Unlike the latter, Cristina was born into a wealthy family in La Plata in the province of Buenos Aires, the eldest daughter of Eduardo Fernandez and Ofelia Wilhelm. She studied law at the local university, where she met Nestor. They married in 1975 and have two children, Maximo and Florencia.

The Kirchners were leftwingers in the Peron movement at a time when the country’s youth was ablaze with indignation at social injustice. In the dark days of dictatorship, tens of thousands were seized by the military for suspected left-wing sympathies and “disappeared” — the euphemism coined for mass murder.

When the Kirchners’ friends began to disappear, they fled to Patagonia. There has been much speculation about the source of the Kirchners’ considerable personal fortune from their activities as property lawyers in the southern province of Santa Cruz, when many lost their homes to repossession during the “dirty war”. More than a dozen such houses, bought at knockdown prices, became the foundation of the Kirchners’ small property empire.

Picking up politics in the late 1980s, Cristina was elected to the Santa Cruz legislature and began her ascent through the senate and chamber of deputies. She was reckoned to be the backbone of her husband’s 2003 presidential campaign. Her own election in 2007 was marred by a scandal featuring a briefcase containing nearly $800,000 which had been confiscated in August that year from a Venezuelan businessman when he entered Argentina. The money, it was later alleged, had been intended as a political donation from Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president.

Further questions about the Kirchners’ wealth arose after the couple declared last year that their personal worth had increased by 605% since 2003. Earlier this month opposition leaders accused them of using insider information to benefit from currency speculation.

These allegations followed Cristina’s removal of the central bank’s president after a dispute over control of the country’s foreign reserves. During his battle to retain his post, Martin Redrado was quoted as threatening to reveal “specific lists of friends of power that bought dollars” — a statement he later denied.

For all her excesses, Cristina retained one firm ideological commitment from her youth — avenging the “disappeared”. Nestor had made the prosecution of officers accused of atrocities during the dirty war a central plank of his administration, repealing the amnesty laws of the 1980s. Cristina has continued the policy.

She has also gone out of her way to help the Argentine veterans of the Falklands war, who had been ignored by successive governments. “Getting benefits for the Malvinas vets is not a vote winner,” said a Buenos Aires journalist. “Like the Vietnam veterans in America, they are associated with military defeat and national shame.”

This history has left Cristina on unfriendly terms with the military, which remains subservient to the government and is believed to be so ill equipped that it could not wage another Falklands war even if ordered to do so.

The president has denied any such intention, claiming the threat of war had been evoked by Britain’s Foreign Office. “I would say that is ridiculous, cynical,” she said.

Queen Cristina’s rule has made her many enemies. Her first run-in was with the country’s farmers, who demonstrated in their thousands in front of the presidential palace in 2008 after she introduced a taxation system for agricultural exports. Her approval rating plummeted from 57.8% down to 23%. It now stands at 28%.

The real Queen Christina — of Sweden — abdicated in 1654 amid increasing discontent with, in the words of her critics, her arbitrary and wasteful ways.

It is a fate that her modern namesake evidently hopes can be averted by her Falklands gamble, thus preserving her husband’s prospects of succeeding her.