(Asuncion) The economist Santiago Peña, the candidate of the Colorado Party (conservative) in power for seven decades in Paraguay, won the presidential election on Sunday over his main centre-left rival who denounced the country’s endemic corruption.
Mr. Peña, 44, a former IMF official, ex-finance minister of President Horacio Cartes (2013-2018) implicated by the United States for corruption, was declared the winner by the electoral tribunal, with more 42% of the vote, against 27.5% for Mr. Alegre, according to 98% of the votes counted.
Shortly before the official result, Santiago Peña had proclaimed his victory, promising the Paraguayans to “banish the fatalism that condemns us to our present. We are masters of our destiny, of our future”.
For weeks, the polls had given Mr. Peña and his rival Efrain Alegre in a rare elbow-to-elbow for Paraguay, where Colorado has dominated political life almost continuously for 76 years, apart from a brief parenthesis on the left under Fernando Lugo between 2008 and 2012. Several analysts spoke of an “unpredictable” scenario.
An “anti-system” candidate, Paraguayo Cubas, with a virulent anti-parliamentary and anti-civil servant discourse, points to 3e position with more than 22%. “He took votes from both camps, but the most injured are the opponents of the Concertacion” of Alegre, explained political analyst Roberto Codas.
Santiago Peña was running for the first time in a national election. In 2018, he was defeated in the Colorado primaries by the current head of state, Mario Abdo Benitez. The outgoing president cannot run for immediate re-election, and Santiago Peña will succeed him in August for five years.
A stigmatized but influential ex-president
“No democracy without bread”, promised Sunday evening Mr. Peña who knows that poverty will be a challenge of his mandate, in an agro-exporting Paraguay with enviable prosperity in Latin America (4.5% growth expected in 2023 ), but with glaring inequalities (24.7% poor). He promised the creation of 500,000 jobs, and better access to public health, stricken.
And in the “Bañado sur”, one of these regularly flooded slums on the banks of the Paraguay River in Asuncion, residents affirmed this week their disinterest in the ballot, for lack of “serious proposal for the poor”.
For Efrain Alegre, a 60-year-old lawyer, once an activist against the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), this is a third failure in as many candidacies. In vain he posed as a destroyer of what he calls the patronage “mafia” of Colorado “linked to organized crime”, a system now “collapsed”, according to him.
PHOTO LUIS ROBAYO, FRANCE PRESS AGENCY
Defeated candidate Efrain Alegre
Corruption weighed on the election, in a country ranked 137e out of 180 in the corruption perception ranking of the NGO Transparency International. And his shadow is not about to let go of the young president.
Mr. Peña had to defend himself from the stigma associated with his close mentor and active supporter, tobacco tycoon Horacio Cartes. Washington qualified him in 2022 as “significantly corrupt” and banned him from entering or transacting in the United States, yet historically an unwavering ally of Asuncion.
Because in a Paraguay with porous borders (landlocked between Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia), a transit point for Andean cocaine, corruption is rampant, and now kills: a prosecutor, an anti-drug mayor and a journalist were murdered in 2022.
Sunday evening, in proclaiming his victory, Mr. Peña was displayed at length alongside Mr. Cartes, still president of Colorado, thanking him warmly for this “great victory”.
Jerusalem, Taipei
In a 90% Catholic country, with a strong Guarani influence (official Amerindian language, like Spanish), Mr. Peña like his rival came together on moral and societal themes, both opposed to marriage for all and abortion. .
“We are a conservative society, it is deeply rooted in us […] and that makes us cautious in the face of major changes in society, ”assumes Mr. Peña, presenting himself as the guarantor of traditions and the family, in the face of a “dehumanized” world.
Light years away from the concerns of the Paraguayans, the election will also have a marginal geopolitical impact.
Mr. Peña affirmed that he will transfer – again – the Paraguayan embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As President Cartes did in 2018, before his successor reversed the transfer a few months later.
On the other hand, unlike his rival, he assured that he will maintain Asuncion’s relations with Taipei – Paraguay is one of the 13 States in the world which officially recognizes Taiwan. Even if Paraguayan business circles would welcome a rapprochement with China.