As the count remains underway, Peru’s National Office of Electoral Processes reported an official tally of 93 percent of votes, placing right-wing former congresswoman Keiko Fujimori in the lead with 50 percent of the vote. That’s just a sliver above the 49.9 percent gained by educator Pedro Castillo, who leads the socialist Free Peru party.
Fujimori’s father Alberto, who was president of Peru throughout the 1990s, is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence over charges of corruption and human rights abuses, as well as the murder of 25 people. Keiko Fujimori, who leads the Popular Force party, had previously run two unsuccessful presidential campaigns.
Enter Castillo in late 2020, who has attributed his surprising bid for president to his students’ struggles amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The son of illiterate peasants, Castillo first rose to prominence as a union leader during a 2017 teachers’ strike.
Castillo’s left-wing ideology has elicited public aversion due to Shining Path, a far-left guerrilla group with a blood-soaked legacy in Peru, including the killing of 16 people in the coca-producing rural town of San Miguel del Ene in late May.
The race comes at a deeply divisive time for Peru, with faith in leadership eroded by a series of corruption scandals and COVID’s devastating impact. Figures reported by the Peruvian government in May has rendered the Andean country the nation with the worst death rate per capita in the world.
Paula Muñoz, professor of Social and Political Sciences at the Universidad del Pacífico in Lima, Peru, told Newsweek the country is “in the midst of a compounded, very acute crisis” not only with heavy human losses, but also blows to its economy.
“This is the context in which inequality has been highlighted by the crisis and has been politicized during the campaign,” Muñoz said.
An ongoing political crisis that predated the pandemic also caused “a lot of political turmoil and instability.”
“We’ve had four presidents in five years, it was very serious for the country,” Muñoz said. “So this election came here, in the context of crisis.”
Muñoz said voters treated the first round of elections, held in April, with “complete indifference.” Both leading candidates’ votes combined did not reach 30 percent.
However, the electorate began increasingly uniting over a common discontent with the system, leading to a clash between those who supported radical upheaval through Castillo and a more conservative base frightened by the prospect of a leftist leader—a fear capitalized by Fujimori, who branded herself as the only solution to combat communism.
Keiko Fujimori champions Fujimorism, the political ideology of her father, whom she plans on freeing if elected. Muñoz said the younger Fujimori “rallied” the party around her, as well as galvanized her father’s base, who have positive memories of the former president’s economic policy.
Keiko Fujimori’s tumultuous political background, however, also led to a spike in “antifujimorista” sentiment. Her career was marked by an embattled tenure in Congress—in which her party held the majority of seats from 2016 until 2020— as well as a controversial corruption case that saw her briefly imprisoned over money laundering charges. During her campaign, the repeated “mano duro” (“heavy hand”) slogan has raised fears of potential authoritarianism.
Though Fujimori is widely unpopular, her polished political experience, coupled with a right-wing opposition to Castillo policies—which would include re-writing the Peruvian constitution and nationalizing key industries—ultimately led to her lukewarm advances, Muñoz said.
Newcomer Castillo ran on a platform rooted in embodying the antithesis of Lima’s political elite, instead banking on identifying with a rural population grappling with pandemic-era struggles.
“People who got impoverished got in poverty again, so they were in the domain of losses,” Muñoz told Newsweek. “So they needed some hope, something that represents an option of change. And he kind of incarnated that, being this humble person that would not let the corrupt system co-opt him.”
