2023-05-01 01:43:25
The candidate for president of Paraguay for the ruling Colorado Party (right), Santiago Peña, achieved this Sunday a wide victory over the opposition Efraín Alegre, with 43.2% of the votes against 27.5%, with 89% of the tables processed by the Superior Court of Electoral Justice (TSJE). The triumph of this 45-year-old economist ratifies the hegemony of coloradism in a pressing context, product of the bitter internal dispute in the formation that governed Paraguay in the last seven decades, with a single interruption, between 2008 and 2012.
Peña managed to overcome the threat of defeat against the center-left candidate Alegre, a member of the historic Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA), head of the broad National Concertation alliance. Another salient fact of the day was the 22.5% of Paraguayo Cubas, candidate of the National Crusade, an emerging radical libertarian right prone to public scandal, with a marked presence on social networks.
The result seemed to reward the macroeconomic progress of Paraguay, one of the Latin American countries with the most sustained GDP growth so far this century, based on soybean exports and maintaining fiscal order and low inflation and debt. On the credit side, which made one think of a more closed election than the one that finally took place, Paraguay has not been able to overcome historical social deficiencies, which include chasms between classes, a labor market with high informality and precariousness in the coverage of basic services of health and education. Between 2003 and 2019, the South American country grew 4.4% on average and forecasts suggest that this year it would return to that path after five years marked by drought and the pandemic.
The result also marks the probably definitive decline of the political cycle of former president and ex-bishop Fernando Lugo, the only leftist leader in the democratic history of Paraguay (2008-2012, overthrown by parliamentary decision). The Guasú (Great) Front of Lugo would only have consecrated one senator of the eight that he put at stake, and among those not elected would be the ex-priest himself. Lugo, who is recovering from a severe stroke, was close to Alegre’s alliance at some point during the campaign, but ultimately avoided formalizing the endorsement.
The victory of the candidate of the National Republican Association (ANR, official name of the Colorado Party) confirms the decisive role in Paraguayan politics of Horacio Cartes, former president 2013-2018, political godfather of the future president. Peña and the Colorado Party grappled during the campaign with the shadow of the State Department’s indictment of Cartes as a politician involved in cases of “significant corruption,” a definition made public last July. Years before, the United States had targeted Cartes for his alleged links to drug trafficking and cigarette smuggling, WikiLeaks cables revealed.
Peña will take office on August 15 for a period of five years and will have, according to the provisional calculation, a majority in both chambers. Some 4.8 million of the 7.4 million Paraguayans were empowered to vote for president and vice president, 45 senators, 80 deputies and 17 governorships. The percentage of participation would have been close to 60% of the census, somewhat lower than that of the past electoral appointments.
Cartes, a millionaire businessman with assets in the tobacco, beverage, refrigerator and soy industries, regained control of the ruling party last December by winning with his faction, Honor Colorado, the same primary election in which Peña was nominated for the presidential candidacy. That instance meant a defeat for the current president, Mario Abdo, head of the internal line Fuerza Republicana.
The White House’s admonition to Cartes led the Colorado Party to play the card against “the globalist agenda” of the Democratic administration of Joseph Biden. The wrestling contained peculiarities, because the opponent Efraín Alegre was clearly not Washington’s favorite. A victory for the PLRA candidate would have meant a rapprochement with China, since Paraguay is the only South American nation that recognizes Taiwan and has no relations with Beijing, in a tradition unequivocally supported by the United States. The White House terminals connect with the Abdo sector, who, formally, supported Peña.
At the time of casting his vote, Peña said that what was at stake was “that the economy improve and we all have a better time in the next five years, or a country where the agenda and efforts are focused on generating divisions and the desire for power for the can”.
“We are going to banish fatalism,” said the victorious candidate as he celebrated in front of his supporters on the night of Asunción. He also called for prioritizing “the common causes that unite us as a nation.”
Peña developed his professional career at the Central Bank of Paraguay. He received a graduate degree from Columbia University in New York and went on to work in the Africa office of the International Monetary Fund. He returned to his country and was appointed Minister of the Economy by Cartes, with whom he forged a solid relationship since 2013.
The distrust of the United States and the division of the Colorado Party will represent a major challenge for the president-elect. The battle with the Abdo sector, highly accused in the media that respond to different factions, was barely parked in the final stretch of the campaign. In any case, in the history of the party that ruled under the ferocious dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) and with democratic governments, the division between factions is not new, and it has managed to live with it.
De Peña is expected to distance himself from the center-left governments of Latin America such as those of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of Brazil; Alberto Fernández, from Argentina; Gabriel Boric, from Chile; and Luis Arce, from Bolivia. Under both Cartes and Abdo, Paraguay adopted the toughest rhetoric against the Venezuela of Nicolás Maduro.
The PLRA, the formation that resisted the Stroessner dictatorship and has an identity that varies between center-right and center-left, will now face its own crisis, after a much lower result than expected and one of the worst since 1989.
Election day passed relatively normally. Isolated incidents were recorded at the time the polling stations were set up, attacks between rival political groups and proselytizing actions not authorized by law. No brawl happened to majors.
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