Paraguayan José Luis Chilavert was a peculiar footballer. He retired in 2004 with the achievement of being the highest scoring goalkeeper in history, with 62 goals, although he was later surpassed by the Brazilian Rogério Ceni, who today holds that record with 127 goals.
At 57 years old, Chilavert is the great living legend of sports in Paraguay and has decided to take advantage of that popularity to run for president of the country in the elections on April 30. However, with less than two months to go before the elections, it does not appear that he is about to score that great goal.
He announced his candidacy last year but, despite his high level of sympathy among the population, which is close to 50%, he has not managed to rise in the polls. At the beginning of February, a poll by OIMA Data gave him a 4% vote intention but in the latest poll, conducted last week by the GEO institute, he did not even reach the point of support, with 0.7%.
Chilavert occupies the fifth position in the electoral preferences of Paraguayans, in a contest where the ex-soccer player does not seem to have caused any dent in what is customary to see every five years: the hegemonic Colorado Party (PC), besieged by the liberals of the historic Authentic Radical Liberal Party (PLRA), which despite being Paraguay’s oldest party, has never managed to win elections with a presidential candidate in recent history. However, the liberal Federico Franco presided over the country between 2012 and 2013, after the dismissal of the leftist ex-bishop Fernando Lugo.
On this occasion, the latest survey -GEO- gives second place to the candidate of the ruling PC, Santiago Peña, with 35.3%, compared to the liberal -in coalition with leftist movements- Efraín Alegre, with 39.7%. . In third place are the populist Paraguayan Cubas of the National Crusade party, with 10.3%, and Euclides Acevedo, former foreign minister with the current government of Colorado Mario Abdo who is running for the New Republic Movement (MNR), with a 5.8%
Despite the polls, Chilavert is not giving up and hopes to surprise, as Jair Bolsonaro did in Brazil in 2018. In fact, the former goalkeeper has declared himself an admirer of the former Brazilian president, for whom he asked for a vote in 2018 , and their positions can also be framed in the extreme right. Like Bolsonaro, Chilavert is ultraliberal and ultranationalist and bases his campaign on questioning endemic Paraguayan corruption and also leftism throughout the continent. But the former player charges against the populism “of Venezuela and Cuba”, without noticing that his positions are also populist.
“The priority is that people eat because there are many hungry people,” Chilavert said during the campaign. “We are going to repeal and we are going to clean up all the bad things done by previous governments, because we are patriots,” he also said.
During the campaign, Chilavert has not stopped being in the limelight more for his controversial sports opinions than for his political proposals. Since his retirement, the exporter has worked as a television football commentator, but whenever he has been able to, he has taken the opportunity to express his political opinions and in the last electoral contests he had already threatened to run for president, although it was only now that he has done so. concretized.
The unfiltered football statements have even caused him a court sentence of one year in prison, although he did not have to go to prison. Last year, a Paraguayan court sentenced the former soccer player to that sentence for defaming the president of the South American Football Confederation (Conmebol), the Paraguayan Alejandro Domínguez, whom Chilavert had accused of collecting a bribe of one and a half million dollars in the framework of the Fifagate corruption case when it was in charge of the Paraguayan Football Association.
Known by Spanish fans, since he played for Zaragoza between 1988 and 1991, Chilavert developed his career in Paraguayan clubs but above all in Argentina, being one of the legends of Vélez Sarsfield in Buenos Aires, a club with which in 1994 he was proclaimed champion of the Libertadores and the Intercontinental Cup.
