the conservative Santiago Peña will be the next president

First modification: 05/01/2023 – 02:12

Paraguayans maintain their political course, the same one they have followed for more than seventy years. The Colorado Party, the great electoral and government machine of Paraguay, once again validates its mandate in the presidency. This time, the face is that of Santiago Peña, the young conservative who won the elections this Sunday, April 30.

With more than 95.73% of the votes counted, Peña obtained 42.87% of the ballots. His main contender, Efraín Alegre, leader of a broad center-left coalition that sought to reverse the traditional Paraguayan continuismo, accumulated 27.53% of the vote. His result was significantly lower than what the polls and the representatives of the National Concertation, the coalition that supported Alegre, projected.

In third place, the candidate with authoritarian and anti-parliamentary overtones Paraguayo Cubas, who wanted to surprise in these elections, won 22.79% of the ballots. With more than 650,000 supports, his proposal, although it was not enough to achieve the presidency, could remain in the Paraguayan political arena.

With this victory for Santiago Peña, the Colorado Party consolidates its hegemony in the country, where it has ruled for 76 years. Peña, a 44-year-old economist and member of one of the most powerful families in the country, based his campaign on the promise of attracting economic investment and generating employment in the country.

He was Minister of Finance between 2015 and 2017 and a former member of the Central Bank between 2000 and 2009, and has promised to create 500,000 new jobs, offer free childcare for working or trainee mothers, implement a comprehensive plan to combat trafficking and drug use and improve access to housing. However, his praise of the “years of stability” of the military dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, also from Colorado (1954-1989), expressed in an interview given in February to the Brazilian newspaper Folha, has been criticized.

Peña has also positioned itself in the international arena. He has announced that he will again move the Paraguayan embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a measure that had already been taken by the previous president, Horacio Cartes, in 2018, before his successor, Mario Abdo Benítez, reversed the transfer a few months later. .

Meanwhile, social issues and the distribution of wealth have been a central issue in the campaign. Despite being an agro-exporting country with a prosperous economy (4.5% growth is forecast for 2023), Paraguay continues to face flagrant inequalities, with 24.7% of its population living in poverty and a poor health and notoriously poor public education.

News in development…