Candidate of the conservative party in power for seven decades, Santiago Peña elected president

The conservatives keep their hand in Paraguay. Economist Santiago Peña, candidate for the Colorado Party in power for seven decades, won the presidential election on Sunday against his main center-left rival who denounced the country’s endemic corruption.

Santiago 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 than 42% of the votes, against 27.5% for Efrain Alegre, according to 98% of the counted votes.

More than 22% for an “anti-system” candidate

For weeks, the polls had given the two main candidates in a rare neck and neck for the country, where Colorado has dominated political life almost without interruption 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-official rhetoric, came in 3rd place on Sunday with more than 22%. “He took votes from both sides, but the worst affected are the opponents of the Concertacion” of Alegre, according to 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.

Strong growth and inequalities

“No democracy without bread”, promised Sunday evening the winner 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.

For Efrain Alegre, a 60-year-old lawyer, once an activist against the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), it is on the other hand 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”. Corruption thus weighed on the election, in a country ranked 137th out of 180 in the ranking of the perception of corruption by the NGO Transparency International. And his shadow is not about to let go of the young president.

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