The world’s longest-serving ruling party was set to be forced out of office yesterday after almost 62 years of power in Paraguay.

Preliminary results based on just over half the votes counted showed that Fernando Lugo, a former Catholic bishop, held an eight-point lead over Blanca Ovelar, the ruling Colorado party candidate.

The first exit polls were greeted with a volley of firecrackers in the capital as Mr Lugo’s supporters began to celebrate. If the result is confirmed, he will become the first opposition leader to take power peacefully since Paraguay’s independence from Spain in 1811.

Addressing jubilant supporters at his campaign headquarters, Mr Lugo, 56, said the election showed that “the little people can also win”.

The defeated Colorado party is notorious for corruption. Many of its leaders have made fortunes in office while running a country where smugglers and drug traffickers operate with impunity. At election time it has traditionally used public sector workers – who must display loyalty to the party to get a job – as well as vote-buying and fraud to hold on to power.

At one rural polling station visited byThe Times, opposition poll observers said that they had come across cases of vote-buying and claimed that the local Colorado governor had been paying people not to vote.

However, at another polling station one Lugo voter said local people who traditionally vote for the Colorado party were deserting it because the promises made at election were worthless. “Our town has a new hospital but there is nothing inside it. When the campaign started the Colorados opened a clinic in their local party branch office. Everyone knows that the day after the election they will close it,” Ernesto Espinala said.

Mr Lugo’s campaign was boosted by widespread disgust at the brazenness of the Colorados. There is also growing desperation at disastrous social conditions and widespread poverty, despite booming agricultural exports.

As bishop for the region of San Pedro, Mr Lugo was know for his work organising landless peasants. He resigned from the Church in 2006 to enter politics. He leads an alliance of 20 parties across the political spectrum. Though the Government tried to paint him as a left-wing extremist, he has always insisted that he is a man of the centre.

“Lugo’s biggest challenge will be enforcing respect for the law. He faces an army of astute and shameless corruptos in every public institution, so he will need an army of managers to occupy and control these entities,” Alfredo Cantero, political editor of ABC Color, Paraguay’s biggest selling newspaper, said.

“It is not enough to have good ministers. It is better to have good directors and managers throughout the state apparatus than to have a minister in his office giving orders no one obeys.”

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