Vertigo count in Peru: the left-wing candidate surpasses Fujimori with 94% counted

BarcelonaPeru will celebrate this Sunday the second round of the presidential elections and the close race in the count between the two candidates is still ongoing this Monday, even with the scrutiny well advanced. With 94% of the votes counted, the left-wing candidate, Roberto Sánchez, has overtaken the radical right-wing candidate, Keiko Fujimori, in an election that is a choice between two pasts. The daughter and political heir of dictator Alberto Fujimori had started by leading the count and with 50% of the votes scrutinized was five points ahead of Sánchez, but as the day has progressed the distance has shortened, until the left-wing candidate has overtaken his right-wing rival.

The percentages are almost equal, with Sánchez around 50.08% of the votes and Fujimori around 49.92%. The ballots remaining to be counted mainly correspond to rural and Andean areas, where the vote is predominantly in favor of Sánchez, while in the big cities, where Fujimori and the right accumulate more support, most polling stations have already closed. In this way, everything suggests that the left-wing candidate will be the winner, but both presidential candidates ask to wait for the final closure of the scrutiny.

The first polls already indicated that this scenario would occur, and predicted a very tight count with a slight advantage for Sánchez. An estimate by Ipsos for the Transparency association gave the victory to Sánchez with 50.3% of the votes, compared to 49.7% for Fujimori, while another projection, in this case by Datum Internacional, also placed the left-wing candidate slightly ahead, with 50.14% of the support.

A country divided by the past

The result draws a clear division into almost equal parts among the Peruvian population, a reflection of the current situation in the country in the political sphere, conditioned by support for or rejection of former president Pedro Castillo. Sánchez ran for election claiming Castillo, who led Peru between July 2021 and December 2022. Today Castillo is in prison and defines himself as the "kidnapped president" of the country after he himself promoted a self-coup in 2022 to break the blockade imposed on him by the legislative power on most of the measures he intended to promote. The left considers that Castillo was expelled from power because of his social program, and has become a symbol for the poorest sectors of the country, especially for the indigenous peoples.

Keiko Fujimori, on the other hand, was the candidate of the radical right. The political space she leads represents the country's elites and power circles located in the big cities. With a program based on extreme neoliberalism and authoritarianism, comparable to far-right proposals on the continent such as those of Javier Milei or Nayib Bukele, her political space and she herself openly embrace the figure of former president and dictator Alberto Fujimori, convicted of crimes against humanity and who led Peru between 1990 and 2000.

This is the second extremely tight recount that Peru has experienced in recent weeks. In the first round, held on April 12, Keiko Fujimori emerged as the clear winner with 17.19% of the votes. In second place, however, there was a tie between Roberto Sánchez and the ultraconservative candidate Rafael López Aliaga, who each gathered around 12% of the support. Then, it took weeks to finish counting all the votes and conclude that the left-wing candidate was the one who had to advance to the second round because he had obtained 21,000 more votes than the ultraconservative.