Agencies
Mexico City
The right-wing lawyer and former security minister José Raúl Mulino has become the new president of Panama and is expected to take office on July 1.
After almost all the votes had been counted on Monday, the opposition candidate received around 34% of the vote, according to preliminary results.
Mulino, who is a close confidant of disgraced former head of state Ricardo Martinelli, plans to stop irregular migration through the Darién jungle in the south of the Central American country towards the United States and to boost the economy.
The outgoing Panamanian President Laurentino Cortizo congratulated Mulino on his victory.
“I spoke on the phone with President-elect José Raúl Mulino to congratulate him on his victory in today’s elections and to wish him success and good health for his new term of office,” Cortizo wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The constitution prohibits the direct re-election of the incumbent.
Some 3 million people were eligible to vote in the election, with polls also being held for a total of 71 parliamentary seats and almost 800 local offices.
Among the eight presidential candidates were José Gabriel Carrizo from the governing Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) party, former president Martín Torrijos, the former consul in Washington, Ricardo Lombana, and the former minister for the Panama Canal, Rómulo Roux.
According to the electoral authority, Ricardo Lombana came second with just under 25 percent of the vote. The lawyer had mainly denounced corruption during the election campaign.
The remaining four candidates had less than 10 percent of the votes.
Mulino is thought to have been propelled to victory by voters who hope the country will return to the economic boom it experienced when Ricardo Martinelli was president from 2009 to 2014.
As his lead in the vote count became unassailable on Sunday, Mulino told his cheering supporters: “Mission accomplished, Ricardo”.
But he also sought to set himself apart from Martinelli, saying that he is “no-one’s puppet” and that he would use the popular mandate he had been given to “work hard, very hard for Panama”.
Mulino, 64, is due to take office as head of state and government on July 1.
The former foreign, security and justice minister, was nominated as a replacement candidate for right-wing populist Martinelli, who was excluded from the race after being convicted of money laundering and sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.
He was granted asylum by Nicaragua and has been staying in the Nicaraguan embassy in Panama since March.
On Friday, Panama’s Supreme Court dismissed a complaint that Mulino’s subsequent nomination had violated the constitution.
After casting his vote on election day, Mulino visited Ricardo Martinelli in the Nicaraguan embassy, where the latter has sought asylum to avoid arrest after he lost his appeal against his money laundering conviction.
