Paraguayans on Sunday elected a president from the rightwing Colorado Party, in power for nearly eight decades, the electoral body said, as voters rejected a center-left challenger who had railed against institutional corruption.
Economist and former finance minister Santiago Pena, 44, won the election with more than 42% of votes cast, results showed, with 90% of ballots counted.Sixty-year-old challenger Efrain Alegre of the Concertacion center-left coalition garnered 27.5% despite having had a narrow lead in opinion polls ahead of Sunday’s vote.The Colorado Party has governed almost continually since 1947 — through a dictatorship and since the return of democracy in 1989, but has been tainted by corruption claims.
The election result leaves Pena facing a challenge to rev up Paraguay’s farm-driven economy, shrink a major fiscal deficit and navigate rising pressures from soy and beef producers to ditch Taiwan in favor of China and its huge markets.“We have a lot to do, after the last years of economic stagnation, of fiscal deficit, the task that awaits us is not for a single person or for a party,” Pena said in his victory speech, calling for “unity and consensus”.