Voting in Peru: nearly one million citizens registered to vote in 75 countries

With many communities around the world, one million Peruvians voted from Chile to Japan, via Spain and the United States, where the presidential contested between the right Keiko Fujimori and the leftist Pedro Castillo mobilized Sunday thousands of people, concerned by “democracy and stability” in Peru.

Among the countries where they have already voted is Japan, where the Fujimori have their roots. Just over 34,000 Peruvians have registered to vote at polling centers deployed in Tokyo, Nagoya, Fukuoka and Hiroshima.

Keiko Fujimori is part of the influential Japanese community in Peru, the second largest in Latin America behind Brazil.

In the capital of Chile, a country neighboring Peru where the largest community of Peruvians in the region lives, queues were recorded in the polling center of Santiago and in other cities of the country, where it was not possible to vote in the first round on April 11 due to restrictions imposed by the pandemic.

“Due to the circumstances in which Peru finds itself, we have to vote and win the Keiko which has a government plan, because this castle which came out of nowhere has ideas to nationalize the land and give it to the peasants. he wins, it would be a throwback to Velasco’s days, “he told the agency. AFP Santiago Abel Saavedra, 52-year-old voter, evoking the dictatorship of the socialist military man Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-1975).

According to election analysts, given the close election between Fujimori and Castillo, voting abroad could be decisive in the final tally.

One million Peruvians living in 75 countries vote, including 117,000 of the 235,165 in Chile, for whom they allowed 12 schools to vote.

“We have an obligation to elect a president because we haven’t seen a change in the country for a long time and we need a change,” said Pedro Fuentes, a Peruvian businessman.

Spain is another of the countries with a colony as large as the one that lives in Chile and where more than 150,000 Peruvians can vote., half of whom enrolled in Madrid, where the Peruvian Nobel lives Mario Vargas Llosa, once a fierce enemy of the candidate’s father, former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), and who now called for votes for Keiko.

Eduardo ParedesThe 37-year-old cell phone salesman said he leaned towards Fujimori in an election between two “very antagonistic” candidates.

Fujimori’s proposal implies that “there will be economic stability, where all investments in Latin America will come to Peru, as long as democracy wins,” Paredes told the polling center in Ifema, in the Spanish capital. .

María García, 58, a businesswoman in Spain, said that despite having left her country 11 years ago, she was voting because it is “a moment as polarized as today”.

While Óscar Flores, a 77-year-old singer, was going to vote for change. “We want him to change, not to continue with the same people who have made us poor all of our lives. This is what I ask as a Peruvian, because we are already fed up, they steal from us and we continue to vote for them ”.

The United States, main destination with a community of over 720,000 Peruvians nationwide, has also seen an influx both in southern California (west) and in Florida and New York (east of the country).

For Peruvians, it is not a question of more elections, because in addition to electing the sovereign who will take the reins of the country on the occasion of the bicentenary of its independence, these elections have become a sort of plebiscite on its economic model.

On the one hand, Keiko Fujimori, who is running for the presidency of Peru for the third time after losing in the second round in 2011 and 2016, has pledged to continue the neoliberalism implanted 30 years ago by his father.

Por el otro lado, Castillo aboga por un reformismo que pasa por una nueva Constitución que permita la nacionalización de los recursos naturales, al considerar que el crecimiento económico no ha resuelto las brechas sociales del país y solo ha beneficiado a las clases más acomodadas, aumentando inequality.

With information from AFP and EFE

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