Business magnate Horacio Cartes won Paraguay’s presidential election on Sunday, returning his powerful center-right Colorado Party to power after the left’s brief spell ended in impeachment last year.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has welcomed peaceful general elections in Paraguay that attracted wide participation, reiterating the United Nations’ willingness to work with the newly elected authorities and people in the South American country.
General elections were held in Paraguay on 21 April 2013.
They resulted in a return to power of the Colorado Party that had ruled the country for 60 years before losing power in 2008.
The presidential elections were won by the Colorado Party’s Horacio Manuel Cartes, who defeated Efraín Alegre of the Paraguay Alegre alliance.
The Colorado Party also won the most seats in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies.
“The Secretary-General welcomes the large turnout and the peaceful manner in which the general elections of 21 April in Paraguay were conducted, confirming the democratic commitment of its people,” according to a statement issued by his spokesperson in New York.
“The United Nations reiterates its readiness to work with the new elected authorities and the people of Paraguay,” he continued in the statement.
According to media reports, at least 52 per cent of the country’s 3.5 million eligible voters participated in the polls.
Businessman Horacio Cartes of the Colorado Party won 46 per cent of the votes, nine points ahead of incumbent Efraín Alegre. Mr. Alegre’s Liberal Party took over the presidency after President Fernando Lugo was impeached last June.
At that time, Mr. Ban added his voice to those of regional leaders who expressed concern about the impeachment process and its implications for democracy in the country.
Mr. Cartes will start his five-year term in August.
The defeated candidate Alegre conceded to Cartes a short time after preliminary results were announced. Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner congratulated the Paraguayan people, describing the election as “exemplary” and announced her endorsement of a re-admission of the country to the Mercosur community.
José Mujica, the president of Uruguay, congratulated Cartes as well and invited him to the Mercosur Summit that is to take place in his country in June.
The European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, Catherine Ashton lauded the high turn-out, orderly and calm conduct of the election.
Catherine Ashton, Baroness Ashton of Upholland, PC (born 20 March 1956) is a British Labour politician who in 2009 became the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy for the European Union.
Under the Treaty of Lisbon, this post is combined with the post of Vice-President of the European Commission.
Her political career began in 1999 when she was created a Life Peer (Baroness Ashton of Upholland) by the Labour Government. Under this government she became the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Education and Skills in 2001 and subsequently in the Department for Constitutional Affairs and Ministry of Justice in 2004. She became a Privy Councillor (PC) in May 2006.
Catherine Ashton was appointed Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Queen’s Privy Council in Gordon Brown’s first Cabinet in June 2007. As well as Leader of the Lords, she held responsibility in the House of Lords for equalities issues, and she was instrumental in steering the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon through the UK’s upper chamber. In 2008, she succeeded Peter Mandelson as Commissioner for Trade in the European Commission.
In December 2009, she became the first person to take on the role of High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy that was created by the Treaty of Lisbon. As High Representative, Baroness Ashton serves as the EU’s foreign policy chief.
Among the first felicitators was also Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.
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Lilian Soto is a longshot to win Sunday’s election, but she may have already changed the last South American country to have female voting rights.
LE MONDE/Worldcrunch
ASUNCION – In Sunday’s national election, Paraguay, a country still both firmly patriarchal and culturally macho, will have the possibility to vote for the first time for a woman to be their president.
The feminist party, Kuña Pyrenda (“platform” in the indigenous language Guarani), has put forth Lilian Soto, a surgeon and graduate in Public Administration from the University of Ohio, to lead the South American nation of 6.5 million.
Magui Balbuena, head of the National Coordination of Rural and Indigenous Women, ran for vice president.
A leftist militant since her student years, Soto, 50, appears confident, even though polls have her trailing far behind leading candidates, Horacio Cartes, a tobacco magnate and former public works minister Rival Efrain Alegre, vying for the presidency 10 months after the resignation of Fernando Lugo, the former “bishop of the poor” ousted by Parliament.
Still, despite her slim chances Sunday, Soto is proud to have “introduced the feminine element into the political debate.” She says that a “feminist and socialist movement was necessary in Paraguay, where gender inequalities, just like social inequalities, are ignored by traditional parties.”
Kuña Pyrenda, created in 2010, gathers female “students, employees, peasants, indigenous, but also from the bourgeoisie,” Soto explains.
The party struggles for the legalization of abortion, in a conservative and Catholic country, where clandestine abortions are the leading cause of mortality for young women. Soto says they favor same-sex marriage and the protection of rights of discriminated minorities.
Single and childless, she has been harassed by journalists with questions about her private life. She had to publicly proclaim that “no, I am not a lesbian!”
A former Secretary of State for Public Service in center-left government of Lugo, Soto has made violence against women and defense of mothers central to her campaign.
This is a country where only three out of ten children are recognized by their fathers.
The country has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Latin America.
De facto polygamy is rife.
A poster at the entrance of the Kuña Pyrenda headquarters in Center Asuncion declares:
“If women were able to rebuild Paraguay after war, I want women to govern my country in 2013.”
Paraguay, Kuña Pyrenda celebrates, “introducing the feminine element into the political debate.”
April 22, 2013 by
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