BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — An Argentine senator, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, was elected president yesterday to succeed her husband, Nestor Kirchner, promising to maintain policies that cut unemployment to a 15-year low, exit polls showed.

Ms. Fernandez, 54, received 46.3%, enough to avoid a second-round vote. Her closest rival — an ex-congresswoman, Elisa Carrio — has 23.7% and a former economy minister, Roberto Lavagna, has 13.1%, an exit poll by Todo Noticias television station showed. The victory makes her Argentina’s first elected woman president.

“The basis for Fernandez’s support is clearly a desire for continuity with Kirchner policies that produced economic growth,” a political analyst, Fabian Perechodnik, at Buenos Aires polling company Poliarquia Consultores said. “There might be some changes in style, but that’s it.”

Ms. Fernandez has said little about how she plans to address the country’s quickening inflation and energy shortages, arguing both are natural outcomes of economic growth. Under Mr. Kirchner, 57, the economy expanded 9% annually as it bounced back from a four-year recession. In 2002, before Mr. Kirchner took office, gross domestic product shrank 11%, and the peso lost 70% of its value. The meltdown followed Argentina’s decision to default on $95 billion of debt in late 2001.

A separate exit poll by Cronica television station gave Ms. Fernandez 46%, compared with 25% for Ms. Carrio, also enough to give her a first-round victory. Buenos Aires-based C5N television station also said Ms. Fernandez won the election.

“After what we went through in 2001, it’s very good to have normal elections,” Mr. Kirchner said, before he and his wife cast their ballots this morning in the Patagonian city of Rio Gallegos.

Ms. Fernandez, who has spent six years in the Senate, campaigned on the slogan “The Change Has Just Begun” and a pledge to “deepen” her husband’s policies. Mr. Kirchner’s mix of price controls, government spending, and dollar purchases to keep exports competitive rescued the country, she said. Unemployment dropped from 22% in 2002 to 8.5% in the second quarter of this year. GDP grew 40% from 2003 through 2006. In a speech on October 24, Ms. Fernandez responded to opponents’ complaints that the economy is overheating, fueling inflation, while lack of investment in the energy industry because of rate caps has left the country short of power. Mr. Lavagna, 65, who was Mr. Kirchner’s economy minister until November 2005, has said the real rate of inflation is double the official 8.6%.

“We understand that we can’t stop economic growth,” Ms. Fernandez told business executives in Cordoba. “There’s no way to regulate the level of growth as if we had a switch.”

Ms. Fernandez, running as the candidate of a coalition she and Mr. Kirchner founded in 2003, never held a news conference during the campaign and didn’t issue a platform. She only sat for interviews in the last two days of the campaign. Her television ads focused on the contrast between conditions today and during the 2001 crisis.

Ms. Fernandez’s support is drawn mostly from unions, the poor, and the lower-middle class, the traditional base for Peronists — politicians who adhere to the ideas of Juan Domingo Perón, Argentina’s three-time president between 1946 and 1974.