Official Santiago Pena wins the presidency of Paraguay and extends the dominance of his party in power

The right-wing candidate Santiago Pena, from the Colorado Party, was proclaimed the winner of the presidential elections held this Sunday in Paraguay , in a day in which the ruling party also won a majority in the Senate and prevailed in at least fifteen of the seventeen governorates in dispute, according to the official provisional count.

Pena obtained more than 42% of the votes against Efrain Alegre and his center-left coalition, who obtained 27% of the votes, after a report by the Paraguayan electoral authority, which already counts more than 90% of the polling stations. .

Gracias a cada uno de ustedes, ¡Gracias Paraguay!🇵🇾 pic.twitter.com/Ve4xAAtG9X

— Santiago Peña (@SantiPenap) April 30, 2023

The Colorado Party has governed Paraguay for almost seven decades, in dictatorship and democracy, except for the period from 2008 to 2012 , when Fernando Lugo governed , dismissed by impeachment before finishing his term.

After learning the results, Peña delivered a speech to dozens of followers, “I call for unity and consensus to achieve our destiny of collective well-being and prosperity without exclusions. The time has come to postpone our differences, to prioritize the common causes that unite us as a nation.”

“From tomorrow we will begin to design the Paraguay that we all want without gross inequalities or unfair social asymmetries,” he added.

He anticipated that the task to be done “is not for a single person or just for a party”, after “the last few years of economic stagnation, fiscal deficit, with a worrying unemployment rate and the increase in extreme poverty.”

Among the main challenges facing Paraguay, one of the most important is growing insecurity, many of them related to the transfer of drugs to Argentina and Brazil, the largest economies in South America.