Voting by ballot in Peru: Keiko Fujimori awaits overseas votes and Pedro Castillo hopes to retain advantage with support from rural areas

The left candidate Pedro Castillo leads the vote count in Peru over his rival Keiko Fujimori, in an open process. The 51-year-old rural teacher took the lead on Monday but continues the fight alongside the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, 46 years old, according to the calculations of the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE).

In the early hours of Tuesday Castillo confirms his advantage with 50.26% of the vote, against 49.73% of Fujimori with a total of 96.66% of the tables counted.

Keiko Fujimori’s advantage has been reduced as the counting of the minutes of tables in rural and jungle areas has been done. It can also be key overseas voting, with a million voters, and processing can take up to 15 days.

“The results we have so far are a clarion cry, a clear and firm call for reconciliation and national unity”, underlined the interim president Francisco sagasti in his first reaction after the vote.

It is not yet possible to confirm the victory of the left candidate, What to win, he would be the first President of the Republic outside the Limonnaise elites who have dominated the history of the country since colonial times, because the distance between the competitors is minimal and the variables of the count are very wide.

However, Fujimori’s mathematical margins are shrinking every moment.

Rural and foreign voting

Again the vast majority of votes of Peruvians abroad remain to be counted, several hundred thousand votes in which, as the counting progresses, Fujimori gets more support.

But also so many thousands of voices from the rural interior are missing, or the vote in favor of Castillo exceeds 80%.

The race will then see if Fujimori is able not only to compensate for the distance that already separates him from Castillo., but also the weight of the peasant vote which supports the candidate of the left party Peru Libre.

Even more, Fujimori sees how the vote almost mirrors the rapid count estimates made by pollster Ipsos on Sunday night., which gave Castillo the victory by 0.4 percentage point.

Until the date, Ipsos’ quick tally never failed to predict the electoral winner in Peru.

Fernando Tuesta, former director of the ONPE, told the news agency AFP What chances are that Castillo “could win because part of the rural and foreign vote is missing ”. And he said: “There will come a time when the count will slow down because it takes time to process (rural / foreign) cases.”

Calm and expectation

As the count’s drama unfolded, the candidates and their supporters kept a certain calm, as well as the citizens who kept doing numbers and statistical calculations to try to find out who and how much would win the vote.

Castillo traveled in the early hours of Monday from Chota, where he voted on Sunday evening, in the direction of Lima, the city where he arrived around noon and where he took refuge at the headquarters of his party.

At first, he announced that he would be giving a press conference, although shortly after his appearance was canceled and the official silence of the Peru Free campaign followed.

FujimoriFor his part, he locked himself up at the start of the day in his headquarters in Lima. He denounced a “systematic fraud” in the ballot, pointing to a series of alleged irregularities that he attributes to the Peru Free party of his rival Pedro Castillo.

“A series of irregularities have occurred” in the electoral process conducted on Sunday, Fujimori said at a press conference he offered on Monday afternoon, in what was his first appearance of the day. The right-wing candidate also asked citizens to report cases of which they are aware.

“We also noticed that there was a strategy to skew the results that reflect the popular will“, He added, without proposing other arguments.

Pending the end of the scrutiny, appeals for calm have emerged from those who support her.

“Serenity. Many files must be dealt with in the provinces […] where @KeikoFujimori will make the difference within the national territory, then it misses the USA, Europe, Chile, etc., where it will triumph with a wide margin, ”he tweeted Alvaro Vargas Llosa, son of Nobel Prize for Literature Mario Vargas Llosa, who supported the Fuerza Popular candidate.

Two opposing options

For the candidate, this situation is, for the moment, a déjà vu, since five years ago, he lost the ballot against Pedro Pablo Kuczynski by only 40,000 votes, after months ahead in the polls and despite an advantage on election night.

Fujimori, who also lost the 2011 presidential elections to Ollanta Humala in the second round, you will be faced with almost total security if a money laundering trial fails for which the prosecution is asking for more than 30 years in prison.

This legal situation was one of the slabs of his campaign in which its unpopularity has been one of the central axes.

For this reason, he set up this election as a referendum between “freedom and communism” and in defense of the neoliberal economic model established by his father, which polarized the entire campaign.

Fujimori Fuerza Popular party candidate advocates continuation of the system her father set up 30 years ago, with an open market and a promoter of private investment which has enabled the country to grow by leaps and bounds in recent decades.

At the head, Castillo, teacher and union leader of the teaching profession, has embarked on a a profound reformism which includes a new Constitution and the nationalization of natural resourcesShe considers that economic progress has only benefited the wealthier classes and has not bridged the deep social gaps.

The winner will take office on July 28, The day Peru will commemorate 200 years of its independence, a holiday mourning the economic and health crisis by registering more than 180,000 deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, making it the country with the highest death rate. highest in the world by coronavirus.

(With information from AFP and EFE)

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