Julián Domínguez

Julián Andrés Domínguez (born 24 November 1963) is an Argentine politician of the Justicialist Party. He was twice Minister of Agriculture, in the cabinets of presidents Alberto Fernández (2021–2022) and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2009–2011).

From 2011 to 2015, he was President of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies.

Early life and career Domínguez was born in the Buenos Aires Province town of Chacabuco, located in the heart of the Pampas and the Argentine maize belt. His grandparents were smallholders, and made artisanal honey, jams, and cheeses. His mother, Nélida Olivetto, raised young Julián as a single mother, and worked at the grade school he attended. He enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires and entered Law School, though without ultimately earning a degree. He married Claudia Moreno, with whom he had four children and adopted a fifth. In 2013, he finished his degree in law at the University of Buenos Aires.

Political career Local and provincial politics He returned to Chacabuco in 1994 and was elected intendente (mayor) the following year on the ruling Justicialist Party (Peronist) ticket. Domínguez was elected to the Lower House of Congress in 1999, but forfeited his seat following an offer for the post of provincial Public Works Minister by Ruckauf, who had been elected Governor of Buenos Aires. He was influential in the governor's 2001 decision to rescind the province's water service concession granted several years earlier to Azurix, a local Enron subsidiary.

He was elected to the Buenos Aires Province Legislature in 2003, and his work with Ruckauf and Duhalde, both former governors who still wielded influence in the provincial capital, helped result in Domínguez's prompt election as the body's Justicialist Party caucus Whip. Pending, however, were improvements in strained relations between the center-left administration of President Cristina Kirchner and (among others) nation's important agrarian sector, whose leading figures approved of her decision to reinstate the Agriculture Ministry, but expressed skepticism at the appointment to the post of a legislator with no farming experience, and who had recently supported a hike in provincial farm income taxes.

Domínguez's tenure saw the federal government regain the initiative to some extent vis-à-vis the agrarian sector. and the proposed return to a Federal Grain Board (such as the one prevailing in Argentina between 1935 and the creation of ONCCA in 1996), as well as the revival of the Federal Agrarian Council of provincial officials dealing with the sector, succeeded in dividing the powerful agrarian lobby round table, the Mesa de Enlace.

He was elected to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies in 2011, he was named president of the body on 6 December.