Paraguay Gears Up For Tight Presidential Election

Asuncion, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 28th Apr, 2023 ) :Paraguayans go the polls Sunday for the South American country's closest presidential race in many years, with a center-leftist coalition hoping to end an almost unbroken, seven-decade run for the ruling right-wing Colorado party.

The vote comes at a difficult time for the party that has governed almost continually since the 1950s -- through a dictatorship and since the return of democracy in 1989 -- with several of its leaders recently sanctioned for graft by the United States.

This has complicated the position of the party's presidential candidate Santiago Pena, a 44-year-old economist and former finance minister whose political mentor, ex-president Horacio Cartes, is among those under suspicion.

Pena faces 60-year-old lawyer Efrain Alegre of the Concertacion coalition of centre-left parties, who is leading narrowly in opinion polls amid a recent anti-incumbency trend in Latin American elections.

"They (the Colorado party) know that we will win, so they feel nervous," Alegre told AFP this week.

In the last election in 2018, President Mario Abdo Benitez took victory for the Colorado party by a slim margin of less than four percentage points.

Opinion polls indicate this year's race is even closer in a country that only allows a president to serve one term.

Polling group AtlasIntel has placed Alegre in a slight lead with 34.3 percent of voter intention compared to 32.8 percent for Pena. An anti-establishment right-wing party is in third place with 23 percent.

"You don't win with surveys, you don't win with resumes," Pena told AFP.

"You win with the popular vote that manifests itself on election day. I feel very calm, very peaceful knowing that I have given everything humanly possible," he said.