Paraguay will not switch to the left. While the polls announced a tight ballot, Santiago Peña, the candidate of the Colorado party (conservative), in power for seven decades in this South American country, largely won the presidential election on Sunday, April 30 against his main center-left rival, Efrain Alegre.
Santiago Peña, a 44-year-old economist, was declared the winner by the electoral court, with more than 42.7% of the vote, against 27.4% for Mr. Alegre, according to the count of 99.9% of the votes, in this election in a single round. This former finance minister, close to former president Horacio Cartes (2013-2018), will succeed Mario Abdo Benitez in August for five years. In Paraguay, the president cannot run for immediate re-election.
Shortly before the official result, Santiago Peña had declared his victory, promising the Paraguayans to “banish the fatalism that condemns us to our present. We are masters of our destiny, of our future.. Social issues and the distribution of wealth were a strong theme of the campaign, in an agro-exporting country with enviable prosperity in Latin America (4.5% growth expected in 2023), but with glaring inequalities (24.7% poor), and the notoriously weak public health system. But the wave ” pink “ which in the last five years has seen alternations from Mexico to Chile, from Colombia to Brazil has not reached Paraguay.
The majority Conservative party in Parliament
For weeks, the polls had given Santiago Peña and Efrain Alegre in a rare elbow-to-elbow for Paraguay, where the Colorado party has dominated political life almost continuously for seventy-six years, apart from a parenthesis on the left under Fernando Lugo between 2008 and 2012.
A candidate ” anti-system “Paraguayo Cubas, with its virulent anti-parliamentary and anti-official discourse, comes in 3ᵉ position, winning more than 22.9% of the vote. “He took votes from both sides, but the most injured are the opponents of the Concertacion” d’Alegre, according to political analyst Roberto Codas, interviewed by Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The influence of the Colorado party is also palpable in the Senate, where with 43% of the vote (23% in the center-left), it will have an absolute majority, as well as in the Chamber of Deputies according to projections based on results partials. He also won 14 of the 17 seats of provincial governors.
Passed by the IMF, Santiago Peña asserted himself during the campaign in phase with the “conservative society” of Paraguay, 90% Catholic. He, like his adversary, had expressed their opposition to marriage for all and to abortion.
Affable smile, youthful features barely betrayed by a touch of gray at the temples, Mr. Peña describes himself as a man of listening and responsibility, and often cites his young fatherhood, at 17, as a determining factor in his life, which pushed him to study hard, work early, and “wanting to serve”. “It was a really difficult moment (…) which helped me appreciate the values I had received. Reading, writing, history, math, we learn at school. But values, we learn them at home”he explained this week to Agence France-Presse.
Passed by the IMF
Juggling with his wife between university and guards, Santiago Peña trained as an economist in Asuncion, then in public administration at Columbia (New York) thanks to a scholarship. At 22, he joined the Central Bank of Paraguay, at 31 at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, then at 34 on the board of the Central Bank of his country.
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Although long affiliated with the Liberal Party (center-left), Santiago Peña was Minister of Finance (2015-2017) in the government of Horacio Cartes, of rival Colorado, where he will end up enlisting in 2016. Pure careerism, according to its detractors.
It is also actively supported by Horacio Cartes that Mr. Peña this time won the Colorado primaries, after his failure in 2018. Which earned him the joke of “puppet”Or “chilli” (servant, in Guarani) of the wealthy ex-president. During the campaign, he attempted to distance himself from international opprobrium over Horacio Cartes, which Washington in 2022 called a “significantly corrupt” and subject to prohibitions of entry or transactions in the United States.
A party tainted by corruption
During the campaign, the candidate of the left, Efrain Alegre, posed as a slayer of what he calls the “mafia” Colorado patronage “related to organized crime”a system now “collapsed”, according to him. Paraguay is ranked 137ᵉ out of 180 in the corruption perception ranking of the NGO Transparency International.
Sunday evening by proclaiming his victory, Santiago Peña nevertheless appeared alongside Mr. Cartes, and thanked him for this “big win for Colorado, big win for Paraguay”.
Inequalities and poverty will be a major domestic challenge for the young president, who has focused his campaign on jobs – he promises 500,000 job creations – and better access to public health, which has been devastated.
Externally, he assured that his proximity to Horacio Cartes would not affect the privileged relationship that Paraguay has with the United States. Moreover, while he does not intend to question Asuncion’s relations with Taipei – Paraguay is one of the 13 states in the world that recognizes Taiwan – he did, however, confirm that he would transfer the Paraguayan embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. President Cartes had already done so in 2018, before his successor reversed this transfer a few months later.