Former Finance Minister Santiago Peña, 44, became the new president of Paraguay on Tuesday.
“Today I honorably assume the responsibility of serving you as your president. I address you with humility and determination, and I promise to sustain and consolidate the necessary competencies to govern successfully,” Peña said.
In this way, the Colorado Party, which has governed the country almost uninterruptedly for the last 71 years, will remain in power for another five years.
Mario Abdo Benítez, Peña’s political rival within the party, leaves power to make way for the new president, who arrives with the support of former President Horacio Cartes (2013-2018).
Peña began his political participation in the Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA), the main opposition space, but in 2016 he joined the Colorados to take over as Cartes’s minister.
Peña arrives at the Palacio de López with just six years of colorado militancy after a previous attempt to reach the presidency in 2017, to try again successfully this year.
After an inauguration ceremony in Congress, Peña swore in the ministers of his cabinet, after being elected with almost 43% of the vote on April 30 in the general elections.
The road to the presidency
Until 2015, Peña was a foreign body in national politics.
Economist from the Catholic University of Asunción, where he taught Financial Theory and Economic Theory, in 2001 he traveled to the United States to pursue a master’s degree in Public Administration at Columbia University, New York.
Peña joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF) team in Washington in 2009, where he directed the organization’s link with Africa. “In those years, the potential that I saw for my country from the outside generated a great impact on me,” he told reporters before the party’s internal elections.
For a decade he was a member of the Central Bank of Paraguay, first in the area of Economic Research and then as director, but he had to wait until 2015 to start playing in national politics.
In 2017, the president of Paraguay at the time, Horacio Cartes, summoned him to lead the Ministry of Finance. And a few months later he crowned her as his heir in the Colorado Party.
In one of the few countries in Latin America without a runoff election, where presidents cannot be re-elected, Peña’s entry into government in 2015 made him one of the visible faces of the country’s main political force.
A short time later, Peña said that he felt it was time to “go down to the electoral arena to do more.” It was thus that he resigned from the Treasury to run as a candidate for president of Paraguay.
In the 2017 party internships, Peña lost to Mario Abdo, whom he now replaces as president.
In 2018, once the Cartes government ended, the current president of Paraguay had his first experience in the private sector.
That year, he became a member of the board of directors of Banco Basa, owned by Grupo Cartes, the former president’s business conglomerate which, according to Peña himself, represents 2% of the national GDP.
Among his strengths, Peña has the experience of having gone through management and having known how to patiently build a more far-reaching profile.
The relationship with Horacio Cartes
For some, Peña is Cartes’ “protégé”. For others, he is the one who will protect the former president in the coming years.
The situation of his main ally is not easy. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the United States Department of the Treasury defined Cartes in the middle of last year as “significantly corrupt.”
“Cartes engaged in acts of corruption before, during and after his term as President of Paraguay. Cartes’s political career was based and continues to depend on corrupt media for success,” the State Department statement said.
Despite accusations from the United States, Peña never walked away from Cartes.
“We are talking about a former president who has made transparency and good management an important flag, of which I am totally convinced that this was the case,” Peña said after learning of Washington’s sanctions.
However, Peña tries to present himself as a politician with no strings attached. “I was a collaborator of the government of Horacio Cartes and I can tell you that in two and a half years I acted with total autonomy,” according to statements to ABC Color.
From the opposition, they do not believe that the new president will govern independently of Cartes.
“He is an impromptu candidate, who has no experience or political leadership, it is an accident. He is actually Horacio Cartes’s front man,” said Alegre, defeated in the elections.
The president’s challenges
Maintaining a controlled economy and improving its performance will be one of the main challenges for Peña, who has said that the country’s macroeconomic figures, praised abroad, are not the only thing he should pay attention to.
For this reason, among the campaign promises is that of responding to the most urgent needs of people living in poverty.
“It is time to reach an agreement to achieve the quality of life that Paraguayan families deserve, where consensus is an obligation,” Peña said in his first speech as president.
It will also take on the challenge of creating half a million new jobs. “We will create 500,000 new jobs to improve the situation of thousands of Paraguayan families,” she promised during the campaign.
But in addition to the economy, the internal unit will also have to feed from this August 15. He will have to deal with the Colorado parliamentarians in a double situation: without their own autonomy and with a division between Mario Abdo and Horacio Cartes.
At the international level, Peña said that he will seek for the country to be a “protagonist in the concert of nations”, in reference to its natural resources such as water, food and energy.
In his inaugural speech on Tuesday, he ratified the importance that his government will give to the relationship with Taiwan, of which he assured that they feel “not only allies” but also “brothers.”
“Our relationship with the Republic of China Taiwan is a sample of this and Paraguay’s friendly and cooperative spirit with nations for which we have great affection and with whom we feel not only allies, but also brothers,” said the new president. .
*This note was originally published after the presidential elections in April and was updated on August 15 with Peña’s inauguration.
Remember that you can receive notifications from BBC News World. Download the latest version of our app and activate them so you don’t miss out on our best content.
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c1rzw8x8l2xo, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-08-15 17:40:12
#Santiago #Peña #young #economist #president #Paraguay