Elections in Peru: there will be a second round between the i …

From Lima

There will be a second round in the contest for the presidency of Peru. It was already planned. But in the tightest and most uncertain elections the country can remember, the official results at 42.97%, given on Monday at 3:40 a.m. (5:40 a.m. in Argentina), did not dispel the uncertainty about find out who the two candidates will be. who will contest the ballot in June. However, according to an unofficial quick count, considered fairly accurate, the second round It would be contested by the leftist and head of the teachers’ union, Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori. What i would put face to face with a candidacy from the radical left and another from the extreme right. Fujimorism is once again becoming a threat to the country’s democracy. Castillo was the surprise. A week before the election, he was seventh in the polls.

According to the results of the rapid one hundred percent count, with a representative sample of the whole country, carried out by the pollster Ipsos, Castillo occupies the first place with 18.1 percent. Keiko Fujimori is in second place with 14.5%. The third is the far right Rafael López Aliaga, known as “Porky”, with 12.2%. Then there is the neoliberal economist Hernando de Soto with 10.7%, the centrist Yonhy Lescano with 9.8% and the leftist Verónika Mendoza with 7.9%. There were eighteen candidates, including former president Ollanta Humala, who barely got 1.5%.

The official 42.97% exam coincides with Castillo’s quick tally to first place, to which he gives 15.98%, but subsequent positions vary, adding to the uncertainty. The second of the partial official result is De Soto with 13.81%, the third López Aliaga (13.05%), in fourth place Keiko (12.68), then Lescano (8.98) and Mendoza (7.89) ). The 42.97 percent examined is not a representative sample of the entire country, so it is considered that the numbers closest to the final result would be those from the quick count. In previous elections, Ipsos’ quick tally had margins of error of less than a percentage point.

It was a election which revealed the lack of representativeness of all political groups, with the pointers with a very low vote. Never before has someone won an election with so little support. A lack of representation that reflects the deep crisis of a political class discredited by successive corruption scandals – six former presidents and several candidates, like Keiko, have corruption charges – and by their inability to deal with the country’s serious problems .

With the first result at the exit of the exit, given at the close of the vote at 7:00 p.m. (9:00 p.m. in Argentina), which placed him first, but did not guarantee his ticket to the second round, Castillo opted out of caution. He received the results at his local supporter in the northern region of Cajamarca, where he was born and is a rural teacher. With these first data, an uproar erupted among his supporters. The candidate asked for calm. Dressed in the classic wide-brimmed white hat from the Andean region of the country, which he wore throughout the campaign, the 51-year-old candidate hugged his parents and said he would wait for the official results.

“I ask my people for calm. I know there is a lot of excitement, but this result is an investigation, we have to wait for the official result ”, they declared after seeing these first results.

After 11 p.m., still with no official results to clarify matters, but with the swift 69% tally given at that time securing his passage to the second round, Castillo left his fan premises to proceed to the Plaza de Armas de Cajamarca, where he spoke to his enthusiastic fans.

“Today the Peruvian people took off the blindfold. Thank you to the Peruvian people for their trust. Tomorrow is not a day of immediate change, but of returning to combat. We are not going to knock on the doors of those who think of bad interests, ”he said in his brief victory speech. He spoke with a mask on the coronavirus pandemic which is reaching its worst numbers these days. Two hours later, the result of the quick count would reach one hundred percent, which confirmed his triumph.

Castillo has seen surprising growth in the last week of the campaign, especially in Andean and rural areas. With the rest of the candidates with weak support, it did not take dramatic growth to come out on top by election time. He harvested discontent at the deep inequalities aggravated by three decades of neoliberalism.

The leader of the teachers ‘union rose to prominence in 2017 when he led a teachers’ strike that lasted more than two months. In this strike, he played against the wall with the Fujimori parliamentary majority to control the government of then President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. The union faction that Castillo integrates has broken left with the union leadership led by the Maoist Patria Rouge party. The now radical left was for nearly two decades a member of the party of former President Alejandro Toledo, defender of the neoliberal model, currently on trial for corruption.

Unlike Verónika Mendoza and the left-wing coalition led by the progressive candidate, whose central themes of their proposals are gender equality policies, abortion legalization and marriage equality, Castillo has conservative positions. on these issues and rejects these proposals. In this, he coincides with the right with which he will compete in the second round. According to some analysts, this may have favored him over Mendoza in the popular sectors and in the Andean and rural areas who adhere to the left and demand a change in the neoliberal model, but are conservative on these issues. The two left-wing candidates agree on the need to change the neoliberal model and the Constitution resulting from the dictatorship of Fujimori.

The country faces again, if the final official results confirm Keiko in the second round, at the risk of the return to power of authoritarianism and the corruption of Fujimori. Shrouded in allegations of corruption and questions about the obstructionist behavior of her parliamentary majority, Keiko appeared politically expelled, but she stood up in these elections. He didn’t need a lot of support to do it. He arrives in the second round for the third time in a row. In 2011 and 2016, he lost in the ballot due to the high level of rejection generated by Fujimori. The competition on this occasion against a candidacy with a radical image like that of Castillo could work in his favor. Analysts agree that the left would be more likely with Verónika Mendoza to beat Keiko or another candidate from the right.

Keiko plays a lot. The daughter of the imprisoned ex-dictator Alberto Fujimori you are faced with the alternative of losing and having to sit in court to answer money laundering charges and face a possible 30-year sentence, which is what the prosecution demanded in the legal process against him, or to win the elections and change the bench of the accused for the presidential presidency.

The electoral result opens a second round in which the continuity or the change of the neoliberal model will be at stake.