By The Star Staff
“We triumphed and rewrote the history of the country today. … We are the second political force in the country,” said Juan Dalmau Ramírez, the candidate for governor for the Alliance (“Alianza de País”) made up of his Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) and the Citizen Victory Movement (MVC), upon entering the PIP central committee headquarters on election night.
“Who would have thought that a candidate from the Puerto Rican Independence Party, representing a countrywide alliance, would break the back of the two-party system in Puerto Rico?” he said, claiming victory for the Alliance over an intense campaign focused on the risks and dangers that a victory for an independence party supposedly represents for the island.
On Wednesday morning, when the State Elections Commission issued a second preliminary certification of partial election results, Dalmau had accumulated 32.78%, or 364,145 of the votes cast for governor, placing him second behind the leading vote-getter, Resident Commissioner Jenniffer González Colón of the New Progressive Party (NPP) with 39.46%, or 438,183 votes.
The candidate of the once powerful Popular Democratic Party (PDP), Rep. Jesús Manuel Ortiz González, was in a distant third place meanwhile with 21% (233,470) of the votes.
Javier Jiménez Pérez of the Dignity Project had the fourth-most votes with 73,613, or 6.63%, while Javier Córdova Iturregui of the MVC received 1,346 votes.
Dalmau said the process that led the PIP and the Alliance “to this electoral victory” was one that did not begin with the 2024 electoral campaign but that has been “building for a long time.”
“This has been a construction of the country’s conscience, where in the last elections 14 percent supported my candidacy and 14 percent supported the candidacy of Citizen Victory,” the pro-independence leader said. “Suddenly, 28 percent decided to build a new country. And today, we not only achieved the support of those two political forces, but many popular [PDP] and statehood [NPP] figures gave me their confidence … ”
PIP Sen. María de Lourdes Santiago, who won re-election, said “what we are experiencing today is something historic.”
Santiago anticipated that the Alliance could achieve greater electoral successes with the election of several of its candidates to various positions, as was the case with lawyer Adriana Gutiérrez of the PIP, who was elected to the District 4 (San Juan) seat in the island House of Representatives.
Despite the difference in votes between Dalmau and González Colón, the PIP leader reiterated that there are no final results until the last vote cast is counted.
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