Peru has fragmented like never before | The incredible dispersion …

From Lima

This Sunday, in the midst of the serious crisis due to the coronavirus pandemic which is reaching its worst moment in the country these days, Peruvians are going to the polls. They will elect a new president from among eighteen candidates and a unicameral Congress for the next five years. These are elections that end a convulsive five-year period, with four successive presidents in power and Congress dissolved. Everything indicates that these elections, with a very divided vote, will prolong the instability, with a future executive without a parliamentary majority and a Congress atomized into a dozen small benches.

With a population overwhelmed by the pandemic and the collapse of the precarious health system, and with a political class strongly discredited by successive corruption scandals, reaching six former presidents and several candidates, there is a fragmentation of the vote never seen before. Those fighting for victory are barely around ten percent.

“At the root of this fragmentation of the vote, there is a problem of political representation. There has been a lack of interest in the campaign because of the lack of interest in politics and because people are concerned about how they are spending their day, how they are surviving this pandemic ”, explains Patricia Zárate, from the Institute of Peruvian Studies.

With this weak support from the candidates, it is certain that there will be a second round. But there is great uncertainty as to who would go on waivers. There are up to seven candidates with the possibility of occupying these two places which give the pass to the deciding body.

According to two polls known Thursday, which cannot be published in the country due to a legal ban on broadcasting polls in the last week of the campaign, between first and seventh place there is less than four points of distance, a difference that it is in the margin of error of the polls.

A vote simulated by pollster Ipsos puts Keiko Fujimori in first place, with 11%. Never before has a candidate been the first with so little support. The second is the chief teacher Pedro Castillo, from the radical left, with 10.8%. It’s the surprise. The third is former Congressman Yonhy Lescano, a populist who moves between the center-left economically and the socially right, with 10.3%. Next come veteran neoliberal economist Hernando de Soto, who was dictatorship adviser Alberto Fujimori, with 9.7 percent; former lawmaker Verónika Mendoza, a moderate left candidate for the Together for Peru coalition, with 9 percent; far right Rafael López Aliaga and former center-right footballer George Forsyth, both with 7.4%. 15 percent say they would vote blank or canceled.

A mock poll by pollster Datum places Lescano first, with just 9.3%, and Keiko second, with 9%. They are followed by López Aliaga (8.9%), Castillo (8.6), De Soto (7.2), Mendoza (5.6) and Forsyth (5.5). 28 percent elect no candidate. A large margin of undecided which contributes to uncertainty.

Alfredo Torres, director of Ipsos, assures us that these elections “are the most fragmented in history”. “Never before have we come to election time with so many candidates with a chance to win. There are seven candidates in a virtual technical tie, each of them can qualify for the second round, ”says Torres.

“It was an atypical campaign due to the pandemic, with voters who could not have had much contact with the candidates. There is a voter who is very unhappy with the options available to him. All of the applicants have very low support. What we have are mini candidates, ”says Urpi Torrado, director of Datum.

With large protests banned by restrictions due to the pandemic, this time around there were no campaign closing rallies. The candidates chose to make caravans or gatherings without large crowds.

Verónika Mendoza closed her campaign in the Andean region of Cusco, where she was born. He made an offering to Pachamama and paid homage to Túpac Amaru, leader of the great indigenous revolution against Spanish rule. “This April 11, it’s not just about electing a new government, it’s about realizing real change for our people. I am going to summon all the democratic and honest forces to move forward together, ”was his last message.

Mendoza was approaching and was well placed to go to the second round, but the surprising growth in recent days of a candidacy that has been placed to his left, that of rural school teacher Pedro Castillo, began to withdraw votes in of the decisive final. stretch. Castillo gained support especially in the Andean and rural areas, a stronghold of the left, which put him in a waiting position in the fight to go to the second round. Castillo, linked to peasant tours, closed his campaign with a horseback ride through the streets of downtown Lima. He said if he was elected and Congress did not approve him, he would shut down Parliament. “I will rule with the people,” he said.

Despite her discredit for the corruption allegations against her – she is being prosecuted for money laundering – and for the obstructionist behavior of her parliamentary majority, which caused a serious political crisis, Keiko Fujimori, who ended her campaign in Lima with a caravan of cars, according to pollsters, has good options to move on to the second round. The stumbling blocks in the home stretch of two other contending right-wing candidates, Hernando de Soto and extremist Rafael López Aliaga, favor her. It would be the third consecutive time that he entered the waiver. In the previous two, 2011 and 2016, he lost in this last instance.

The daughter and political heir to jailed ex-dictator Alberto Fujimori, sentenced to 25 years for crimes against humanity and corruption, has lost much of the support she had, but with everyone very low this time – Here, she doesn’t need a lot of support to leave. in the second round. In this campaign, Keiko defended the figure of her father, from whom she had distanced herself in the 2016 elections, and threatened an authoritarian government and forgiveness for her father. In his last presentation, he called for the vote to defend the Constitution inherited from the dictatorship of Fujimori.

“As everyone wants to face Keiko in the second round, because according to the polls she would lose to everyone, she did not receive a lot of criticism and was calm as she gradually recovered,” said Torres.

Yonhy Lescano, who until recently seemed safe in the second round but is now going through a rough patch, also closed his campaign with a trailer in Lima. He announced that if he went to the poll, he would not make alliances with other groups. Former goalkeeper George Forsyth was left off the pitch in those pivotal days when he fell infected with the coronavirus last Sunday.

The strangest, fiercest and most unpredictable campaign in memory comes to an end. No one dares to predict an outcome.