Paraguay gets pragmatic new president

The Paraguayan presidential election perhaps would not have attracted as much international attention as it did this time because of the China-Taiwan angle. Of the two candidates, the winner, Santiago Pena, a trained economist who has served as Paraguay’s central bank director, finance minister of the country and also at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), stood by the country’s policy of maintaining ties with Taiwan, only one of the 13 countries to still do so.

The losing candidate Efraine Alegre of the united opposition, Pact for a New Paraguay, was for cutting ties with Taiwan and connecting with China, not for ideological reasons as much as economic. Paraguay’s farmers want to benefit from the exports of beef and soybeans that the country can make to China. Though this was of international interest, the victory of Pena, 44, was not due to the China-Taiwan factor. Pena was fighting on the ticket of the long-dominant conservative Colorado party in the country.

And one of the reasons that Pena was fielded as the presidential candidate, and not for the first time, he fought and lost the contest in 2018, was due to the fact that the Colorado party strongman Horacio Cartes is on the US radar on corruption charges.

So, Cortes put up Pena as the front man. Also, Pena might turn out to be the right man for Paraguay at a time when the country is facing an economic challenge of stagnation and ballooning fiscal deficit.

That is why, in his victory speech, he struck a note of conciliation rather than of partisan victory. He said, “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 single party. The time has come to postpone our differences to prioritise the common causes that unite us as a nation.”

Compared to his counterparts in Brazil and Chile, Pena symbolises the solid right-wing conservatives, the man who believes in family and he is quite clear that family comprises father, mother and children, and he is opposed to gay marriages. He married his childhood sweetheart, Leticia Ocampos, and became a father at 17, but that seems to have made him more committed to family and the responsibility that entails.

Paraguay is a landlocked seven-million strong country, and it appears that despite charges of corruption and a weak economy, conservatism has served the country well enough. Pena says of his early fatherhood, “It led me to build on very solid principles of commitment, of responsibility, of honesty, of integrity, of knowing that there are people who depend on you.

And without realising it, when I was 17, I began to develop a vocation of service.” If he stays true to these professed qualities of his then he might succeed in stepping out of the shadow of his political mentor, Cartes, the politician facing United States sanctions.

A businessman observed that Pena wants evolution and not revolution. And one of his political colleagues, Lea Gimenez, who served as his deputy when he was finance minister and later was a finance minister, said of him: “I think what characterises him is that he has infinite tranquillity. Even during this election campaign, which has been so long we have been in the process for almost a year and a half, I have not seen him once lose his temper.”

Pena would need all the good qualities that his colleagues and observers see in him during his time in office because pulling the country out of economic stagnation at a time when the global economy is going through a bad phase is no easy task.