Leonel refutes Abinader’s speech

Former President Leonel Fernández affirmed last night that President Luis Abinader’s speech on February 27 was marked by an “attitude of self-complacency, self-praise, in which exaggerations and statistical manipulations abound”, but he was unable to show real achievements or improvements in the economy, services, and collective well-being. In a television speech, the president of the People’s Force (FP) pointed out that the fallacies were evident when the ruler said that the country registered robust economic growth when the reality is that it fell short of projections. Fernández said that by maintaining that the country grew 4.9% in 2022, Abinader forgot that in 2021 he had announced growth of 12.3%, so if government figures are accepted, last year there was a 7.4% drop in GDP.

In addition, the leader of the FP added that in any case, “this meager growth in 2022 was below the projections estimated by the authorities themselves, which established that the country would have growth of 6% that year. Therefore, compared to the estimate, we had a decrease of 1.1%”. He considered that instead of being among “the countries with the highest global economic growth, as President Abinader claims, in 2022”, the Dominican Republic was in thirteenth position out of 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Under these conditions, Fernández indicated that instead of the Dominican economy consolidating itself as one of the most dynamic in Latin America, as President Abinader stated, “our country has lost the dynamism and leadership that in other times it exhibited in the economic growth of the region”. When examining the different sectors of the economy, Fernández said that although tourism had an exponential growth of 24%, “the exploitation of mines and quarries, however, had a collapse of -7.2%; construction, a collapse of 0.6%; and the local industry, a pyrrhic increase of 2.2%”.