Chandrikapersad Santokhi has been elected the president of Suriname by the Latin American country's National Assembly, according to media reports.  Suriname is a former Dutch colony where people of Indian descent make up the largest ethnic group comprising 27.4 percent of the population of 587,000.

Santokhi of the Progressive Reform Party (PRP), a former justice minister, was elected unopposed on Monday, the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) reported on Monday. He will succeed Desi Bouterse, a former military strongman, whose National Party of Suriname (NPS) lost the election in May as he sent the country to an economic precipice.

The PRP, known in the Dutch language as Vooruitstrevende Hervormingspartij or VHP by its initials, largely represents the Indian community and had originally been called the United Hindustani Party.

Indians were brought over by the Dutch as indentured labourers after slavery was abolished in the colony in 1863 in an arrangement similar to that in neighbouring Guyana, a former British colony.  

Santokhi inherits an economy run to the ground by the populist Bouterse, who mismanaged the country while forging closer ties with China and Venezuela.

Speaking at the National Assembly on Monday, Santokhi acknowledged that the country faced an economic collapse and said his government will reorient policies to work for Suriname's recovery.

Suriname had depended on bauxite exports but recently vast oil reserves have been found in its territorial waters and they could potentially help the country tide over the economic crisis.

Till then it may need bailouts from international financial institutions and the Netherlands, whose colony it once was. Relations with the Netherlands and other western countries had deteriorated under Bouterse, first because of the coup and after his election due to his convictions and his drift to Venezuela and China. 

Sanotokhi will have to try to repair relations with the West.

Santokhi, 61, was trained in a police academy in the Netherlands and rose to be the chief police commissioner of Suriname. He later served as the justice minister in an earlier administration in 2005.

After Santokhi became its president in 2011, the PRP began to broaden its base reaching out to people of other ethnicities with its centre-left policies.

Suriname has had a chequered history after its independence in 1975 marked by ethnic polarisation, a coup and a civil war. After a brief return to democracy in 1987 following the 1980 coup, Surinam had another coup 1990, but democracy was restored a year later.