There has been a change of power in Belize after the opposition centre-left People’s United Party (PUP) clearly won the parliamentary election in the Central American country, according to preliminary results from Thursday.
The 60-year-old former opposition leader John Briceno, previously an environment minister, was sworn in as the new prime minister on Thursday.
According to the preliminary figures, the PUP is expected to hold 26 of the 31 parliamentary seats. Turnout for Wednesday’s election was more than 80 per cent.
Outgoing Prime Minister Dean Barrow of the conservative United Democratic Party (UDP), who had been in office since 2008, did not run again for health reasons.
The former education minister, Patrick Faber, had been campaigning for a fourth four-year term in a row for the UDP.
He congratulated Briceno and called for national unity, for example in the fight against the coronavirus.
With a population of around 400,000, Belize is the poorest country in Central America and the only one in which English is the official language.
The former British colony, which still belongs to the Commonwealth, is located between Mexico and Guatemala on the Caribbean coast.
A year ago, the European Union removed Belize from the blacklist of tax havens.