Leonel Fernández
Leonel Fernández was president of the Dominican Republic from 1996 to 2000 and from 2004 to 2012, the lawyer raised in New York's Washington Heights who was Juan Bosch's protégé and the first president from Bosch's Party of Dominican Liberation, elected in 1996 at forty-two in the run-off that the aged Balaguer's endorsement, given to stop the black candidate Peña Gómez, won for him. He presided over the country's transformation from sugar to tourism, free zones and remittances. There was the growth of seven per cent a year in both his periods, the Santo Domingo metro opened in 2009, and the free-trade agreement with the United States. There was the privatisation of the electricity that never solved the blackouts, the Baninter bank collapse of 2003 that he inherited and the IMF programme that fixed it. There was the constitution of 2010 that he wrote to his own design, and the borrowing and the corruption that Odebrecht's confessions of 2016 put figures on, ninety-two million dollars in bribes across his and his successor's years, for which none of his ministers was convicted. He was born in Santo Domingo in 1953, taken to New York at nine, and returned for law school at the Autonomous University, where he wrote a thesis on the American press and met Bosch, whose running mate he was in 1994 and whose party he took over. He lost the election of 2000 to Hipólito Mejía and beat him in 2004 with fifty-seven per cent after the bank collapse had wrecked the peso. He won again in 2008 in the first round. The second period built the metro, the highways and the state's payroll, which doubled, and the debt, which tripled, while the electricity subsidies took a tenth of the budget and the Haitian question, after the earthquake of 2010, was handled with a field hospital and a border. He left in 2012 to his chosen successor Danilo Medina, who then turned the party against him and amended the constitution in 2015 for his own re-election. In 2019, after a primary he said was stolen, Fernández left the party he had led for twenty years and founded the Fuerza del Pueblo, which came third in 2020 and second in 2024, when he lost to Abinader with twenty-nine per cent. He has said he will run again in 2028, at seventy-four.
- Lived: 1953 CE – ?
- Nationality: Dominican
- Roles: president, politician
