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Ex-bishop tipped to become Paraguay President

— Photo: AP

Fernando Lugo.

Asuncion/Caracas: A former Catholic bishop popular with the poor is favourite to win Paraguay’s presidential election on Monday and sweep away six decades of de facto one-party rule.

Opinion polls give Fernando Lugo a 5 per cent lead, which could be enough to usher him in as the latest member of Latin America’s “pink tide” of leftist governments.

The bearded 57-year-old heads the Patriotic Alliance for Change, a coalition of centre and centre-left opposition parties coupled with grassroots political movements, farmers organisations and other social groups.

The Colorado party, the world’s longest-ruling party still in power, has responded to the mood for change by fielding a woman — Blanca Ovelar. The first woman to ever stand for the top job, Ms. Ovelar has closed the gap and could yet snatch victory to join Chile’s Michelle Bachelet and Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner as a woman head of state in South America.

Mr. Lugo’s share of the vote was put at 34.5 per cent with Ms. Ovelar, a teacher-turned Education Minister, on 29.5 per cent, according to a Coin poll in the newspaper Ultima Hora. A third candidate, Lino Oviedo, a retired army general, polled 28.9 per cent. Paraguay operates a one-round, first-past-the-post system.

For a landlocked, rural country long seen as a sleepy backwater the election has been a colourful and bitterly fought contest which has echoed leftist surges in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Mr. Lugo, who swapped the priesthood for politics, has promised to give peasants more land and to charge Brazil more money for the power it imports from the Itaipu hydroelectric plant, which both countries co-own.

If necessary, he said he would take Brazil to the international court of justice in the Hague to renegotiate the 1973 treaty which obliges Paraguay to sell surplus electricity to its giant neighbour at well below the market price.

To avoid frightening conservative voters, the former bishop has branded himself an independent, not a leftist, and has kept a distance from Venezuela’s self-styled socialist revolutionary President, Hugo Chavez.

In an interview with The Guardian, Mr. Lugo said he was determined to tackle corruption and exclusion: “The gap between rich and poor is a scandal for Paraguayan society ... a gap in which the few live at the banquet table while those at their side live in hunger.” — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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