2023-05-01 16:48:13
The comfortable victory this Sunday of santiago penacandidate of the Colorado Party for the Presidency of Paraguay, consolidates this political formation born in 1887 and which declares itself nationalist, republican and conservative, as the hegemonic force in a country that it has governed for 71 years.
The Republican National Association (ANR), official name of Coloradism, is the second party in Latin America with the longest time in powersecond only to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has ruled Mexico for 77 years.
After his electoral triumph, Peña, a 44-year-old economist, began his speech on Sunday night thanking the party’s president, Horace Cartesthe wealthy businessman who presided over Paraguay between 2013 and 2018 and who continues to control the levers of power, as demonstrated by the triumph of his political dolphin.
Despite the fact that on January 27 the United States sanctioned him for corruption, a month earlier Cartes had managed to take over the presidency of the party, and managed to win his candidate in the primary elections. Tonight, in addition, he reaped an overwhelming triumph for both.
The impossibility that the leaders can be re-elected and the fact that in the presidential elections there is no possibility of a second round –something that in Latin America happens only in Paraguay and Venezuela– means that in each appointment with the polls the options of the ruling party are revalidated.
“The officialist victory in Paraguay has broken the trend of voting to punish the ruling party that has been in force in the region since 2019,” Argentine political scientist and jurist Daniel Zovatto, who has followed the Paraguayan elections on the ground for the past week, told EFE.
The resounding triumph of Santiago Peña over the opponent Ephraim Alegretogether with the important support obtained both in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate, and the victory in fifteen of the seventeen governorships draw a comfortable scenario for a party accustomed to exercising power with hardly any opposition, except that of its own ranks, in an exercise that some analysts describe as political gattopardism.
This has been the case of the current ruler, Mario Abdo Benitezfacing his predecessor in the presidency, and who prevailed five years ago in the internal elections to Santiago Peña, supported precisely by Horacio Cartes.
This intricate political construction explains why tonight Peña directed his darts at the management of the current president, despite being a co-religionist of his own party.
Mario Abdo Benítez himself, son of the person who was private secretary of the dictator Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), decided not to go to the electoral headquarters of the Colorados and limited himself to congratulating who will be his successor as head of state through a laconic message on social networks.
“Congratulations to the Paraguayan people for their great participation in this election day and to the president-elect @SantiPenap. We will work to start an orderly and transparent transition that strengthens our institutions and the country’s democracy, ”he wrote on his Twitter account.
The task that the future government must face, Peña proclaimed, “is not for a single person or just for a party,” after “the last few years of economic stagnation, fiscal deficit, with a worrying unemployment rate and the increase in extreme poverty”.
And although for 71 of the last 75 years the country has been governed by the Colorado Party, he proclaimed: “from tomorrow we will begin to design the Paraguay that we all want, without gross inequalities or unfair social asymmetries.”
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