ASUNCION, PARAGUAY — A former bishop who vows to end Paraguay’s 61 years of one-party rule showed up early to cast his ballot Sunday, as voting opened in a contest against a rival who wants to become her nation’s first female president.
“It’s always good to be first!” top opposition candidate Fernando Lugo quipped after showing up at a school in suburban Asuncion 10 minutes before the opening of polls.
Turning serious, he said he was confident that Paraguayans would elect him in hopes of seeing “a different country.” Lugo, sometimes called “the bishop of the poor,” has likened himself to a Paraguayan David fighting a “monstrous Goliath.” Recent polls showed him leading the governing Colorado Party candidate, Blanca Ovelar, as well as a former army chief Lino Cesar Oviedo.
But no one projected an easy winner Sunday as Paraguay’s 2.8 million registered voters held compulsory voting amid reports of heavy turnout. News broadcasts showed two minor scuffles outside polling places in the capital, but officials said voting was peaceful and without serious incidents around midday.
Ovelar, a 50-year-old former education minister and the protege of outgoing President Nicanor Duarte, also said she expects to win.
She promised to lead the nation to “unprecedented economic growth.” “I am going to bring about change,” Ovelar said to applause as she cast her ballot.
The Colorado Party has endured through democracy and dictatorship in this poor, agrarian South American nation, in power even longer than Cuba’s Communist Party.
Eight months ago, Lugo welded leftist unions, Indians and poor farmers into a coalition with Paraguay’s main opposition party to form the Patriotic Alliance for Change.
Lugo, 56, then launched a charismatic campaign in which he blamed Paraguay’s deep-seated economic woes on decades of corruption by an elite that ruled at the expense of the poor in a country of subsistence farmers.
At stake in Sunday’s presidential vote is the political course of a country whose single-party reign began in 1947 and is the longest continuous run in Latin America.
Lugo, if elected, is likely to have a center-left government, following the trend of similar governments that won office this decade across Latin America.
“Now is the hour of change! Don’t be afraid!” the gray-bearded priest shouted in both Spanish and the Guarani Indian language at a recent rally, where he quoted from the Bible and wore campesino sandals.
Lugo presents the most serious challenge to the Colorado Party since democratic elections returned after the country’s 35-year military dictatorship ended in 1989.
Fueling his charge is voter disenchantment with 13 percent joblessness in South America’s poorest country after Bolivia. Some 43 percent of the 6.5 million Paraguayans live in poverty, and many survive on a meal a day. Thousands have fled to Spain for work.
Ovelar counters that she would be a bold reformer of her own feud-riven party and modernize the landlocked, agrarian nation.
She repudiates Alfredo Stroessner, the anti-communist general who died at age 93 in Brazilian exile in 2006. Instead, she promises to bring a woman’s sensibility to a “clearly macho country.” She called Lugo a “failed priest” unfaithful to the Vatican, which refuses to recognize his resignation. Lugo resigned as bishop in December 2006 to sidestep Paraguay’s constitutional ban on clergy seeking office.
“If this is how he is with God, how will he be with the Paraguayan people?” she asks supporters.
Ovelar promises a more centrist government than the left-leaning women presidents elected in Argentina and Chile since 2005.
Lugo says he was influenced by the same liberation theology frowned upon by the Vatican. But he says he heads a pluralistic coalition and is neither on the “left” nor the “right.” Still, outgoing President Duarte played up fears of a Lugo link to leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in the campaign finale — a charge denied by Chavez.
“Chavez is a military man and I have a religious background,” Lugo told reporters in Washington last year.
A spoiler among five other presidential hopefuls could be former army chief Oviedo, an independent candidate who was jailed and then cleared last year of waging a coup attempt in 1996.
Paraguay’s electoral rules do not provide for a runoff in case no candidate wins a majority; whoever gets the most votes Sunday will succeed Duarte on Aug. 15.
More than 100 international observers, including the Organization of American States, were monitoring the vote.
Paraguayans were also voting to seat a 45-member Senate, an 80-member lower House of Deputies and 17 governors.
