2023-04-23 21:02:07
Paraguay defines in a single electoral instance who will be its president next Sunday the 30th. There will be no ballotage between the two main candidates who arrive best positioned in the polls and quite far from the rest: Santiago Peña, from the ruling Colorado Party and Efraín Alegre, from the Concertación. On August 15, one of them will assume power until 2028. In addition, 17 governors will be voted on in all their departments, 45 senators and 80 deputies.
In a country of profound asymmetries, with the greatest rural population of South America and a historic political hegemony of Coloradism, it is the second time the opposition has real chances of displacing it from the government. The former was in 2008 when the bishop Fernando Lugo interrupted 61 years of continuity, which included the long dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989).
Cartes’ candidate
Peña’s candidacy is the product of the internal in the Colorado Party where he defeated the former evangelical bishop Arnoldo Wiens who was supported by the current president, Mario Abdo Benitez. Backed by the ubiquitous Horace Cartesthe former president who ruled between 2013 and 2018, his 44-year-old former Finance Minister will try to keep the main right-wing force in the López Palace.
A curious fact is that Peña was a member of the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA) for 21 years, to which Alegre belongs, until he joined the National Republican Association (ANR) – as the ruling party is also known – in 2016. At that time He was already an employee of billionaire Cartes, a banker, media owner and businessman in the food and tobacco industries who controls around 70 companies and whom USA sanctioned for corruption.
The measure was applied by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the Treasury Department. In a document dated January 26, he points out that he “incurred in acts of corruption before, during and following his term as president of Paraguay.” The United States takes these claims of extraterritorial power very often, with and without proof. A similar measure was also adopted once morest the current vice president of the nation, Hugo Velázquez, for “involvement in systematic corruption that has undermined democratic institutions in Paraguay.”
Alegre is presenting himself at the head of an alliance of fourteen parties and will compete for the third consecutive time for the presidency. The former Minister of Public Works of Bishop Fernando Lugo lost in 2013 with Cartes and in 2018 with Benítez. But now he is better positioned in the polls. A considerable part of the political support he receives comes from the Great Front, the mosaic of progressive forces that cut the hegemony of the Colorado Party in 2008 and that only appears for legislative positions in the elections. Although today he is divided between accompanying the lawyer who leads the PRLA and a candidate who might officiate as arbitrator in the election: Euclides Acevedo, the former Minister of the Interior of the current president, but who was also an official of other Colorado governments. The question being asked in Paraguay is who will get the most votes from his candidacy. Yes to Peña or Alegre.
The Paraguayan Bolsonaro
Other surveys, carefully disseminated by means of the Cartes group, place the fourth candidate with a double-digit percentage in an expectant position, even surpassing Alegre. The controversial former senator Paraguayan Payo Cubas, born in Washington, USA, the son of a military man and transformed into the emerging ultra-right in the country. There are analysts who They compare him to Jair Bolsonaro, due to his violent verbiage and bad manners, but he has no ties to the armed forces, is in favor of legalizing marijuana and has declared that he will go once morest the landowners. On this contradictory combo, he established himself as the anti-system candidate and with a vote expectation that borders on 15 percent.
Paraguay comes to these elections with a stable currency like the guaraní – which will be 80 years old in 2023 and is the second oldest in Latin America -, an annual inflation rate close to 6.5 percent and a notable reliance on the United States in geopolitical matters. This year The government signed a memorandum of understanding with Washington for US military forces to operate in control of the so-called Hidrovia of the Paraná and Paraguay rivers. The agreement was signed by the local chancellor, Julio Arriola, and ambassador Marc Ostfield. The Argentine Foreign Ministry asked Asunción for explanations for this decision and invoked security problems due to the presence of military forces from outside the region.
The Paraguayan press is divided in its support for the candidates. The Nación Media de Cartes group, led by the daily The nation and which also includes cable TV channels, digital portals and radios such as AM 970, is the key behind Peña, whom he gives as the winner in the elections according to the polls he disseminates. The two newspapers with the largest circulation, ABC Color y Last hour support the Coalition for a New Paraguay of Alegre and its running mate, the young former Minister of Housing, Soledad Núñez. The couple appears above the Colorado Party in the polls according to the media that do not belong to the former president. Another possibility that is mentioned is a technical tie between the two main candidates to win the elections.
Without chances, too far in all the polls, is an old acquaintance of the Argentines, the former goalkeeper Jose Luis Chilavert, from the past in San Lorenzo and Vélez Sarsfield, the club with which he was world champion. He stands for the Youth Party (PJ) with the declared purpose of “confronting socialism and the left.” Perhaps that is why he studied the proposal that Patricia Bullrich made to him to run as a candidate for mayor in the La Matanza party, the most populous in the province of Buenos Aires. “Football, dynamics of the unthinkable”, would say the well-remembered sports journalist Dante Panzeri, a scribe with a sharp pen and portraitist of the miseries of other times that are repeated today. Chilavert will not be the last candidate to use his fame to try for president. Latin America has several antecedents.
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