ON MAY 25th President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner threw a lively party to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of her late husband Néstor Kirchner’s presidential inauguration and thus a decade of Kirchner rule in Argentina. Bands belted out tangos, ballerinas twirled across the stage and orchestras blared until the evening, when Ms Fernández emerged to fire up her supporters with a long speech and much pumping of fists. “Like it or not, this is a victorious decade—not for the government, but for the people,” she declared. Her opponents see it differently, variously describing the decade as “lost”, “wasted” or “trampled”.

None of these descriptions quite captures the reality of the Kirchners' ten turbulent years in power. “What determined a lot of the decade is how it began,” says Juan Cruz Díaz, head of Cefeidas Group, a risk-analysis firm. When Mr Kirchner assumed the presidency in 2003, he inherited a bankrupt and restive country, in debt to the tune of $81 billion and plagued by poverty, violence and political chaos. He was the fourth president in two years. “Kirchner knew that in order to revive the country and survive politically he would need to concentrate power and act boldly,” Mr Díaz says.

Some of those bold actions were broadly popular. Mr Kirchner quickly negotiated the largest debt haircut in history, slashing Argentina’s external arrears by more than two-thirds. He bargained to raise minimum wages and pumped investment into housing and infrastructure. He fought to keep the peso competitive, allowing Argentina to ride high commodities prices to growth that averaged 8.8% during his four years in office. Finally, he was commended for rescuing the Supreme Court from kangaroo status by shrinking it from nine members to five and replacing its tame members with more respected justices.

But in some instances Mr Kirchner took the concentration of government too far, using it to bolster his own power. He altered the composition of the council that nominates judges to give the executive a veto, distributed public advertising according to political affinity, and used his majority to govern almost by decree. In 2007 he intervened in the independent statistics agency, demanding it massage growth statistics and downplay inflation, a move that badly shook the confidence of investors.

He also pulled a subtler, counterintuitive power play: he stepped aside. Mr Kirchner opted not to run in the 2007 presidential election, instead backing his wife, who at that point was a senator. Although the pair never publicly acknowledged such a plan, it was widely assumed that they intended to pass the presidency back and forth for as long as they could, thus sidestepping a two-term limit established in the constitution. “We'd also like to stop the cycle of traumatic government change in Argentina, where every election is a game of Russian roulette,” Ms Fernández said in a 2007 interview with Time magazine.

Hubristic because of her husband’s popularity, Ms Fernández began her presidency brashly, raising agricultural export taxes, her government’s biggest moneymaker. Farmers launched a strike that tarnished Ms Fernández’s image and sparked rumors that she might resign. Instead of backing off, she homed in on new targets, nationalizing nearly $30 billion in private pensions and introducing a media law that sought to dismantle the country’s biggest independent media conglomerate.

In 2010 Mr Kirchner died of a heart attack, putting an end to the plan for alternating rule, but boosting Ms Fernández’s popularity. She trounced the competition when she ran for re-election in 2011, and her party regained the absolute majority it had lost in 2009 during her nadir. She has since used this majority to intensify pressure on those she sees as threats to her power, recently attacking the independent media and judiciary.

The opposition sees these developments as evidence of Ms Fernández's continuing quest to prolong her rule, with or without her husband. For the past year rumours have swirled that she might try to amend the constitution to allow herself to seek a third consecutive term (“re-re-election” is how some of her critics put it). But she seemed to suggest otherwise when she spoke to supporters at her anniversary party on May 25th, stating: “I’m not eternal, nor do I want to be.” Nonetheless, she also called for “another victorious decade”. A question still hangs over whom she sees leading the country through it.