2 candidates with starkly different visions for Peru vie for a runoff spot

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Results Thursday from Peru’s presidential election showed such a tight race for second and third places that it could take weeks to finalize the top two candidates for the country’s mandatory runoff elections in June.

A nationalist lawmaker allied with an imprisoned former president and an ultraconservative politician who promises to reinstate the death penalty are the main contenders against Keiko Fujimori, who was all but assured of taking first place among the 35 candidates in Sunday’s election.

With 93% of ballots counted, official results Tuesday showed Fujimori, the conservative daughter of disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori, leading the count with 17.06%, well below the 50% needed to avoid a runoff.

Behind her, Roberto Sánchez, nationalist deputy and former minister of imprisoned ex-president Pedro Castillo, obtained 11.97%. In third place is Rafael López Aliaga, the ultraconservative former mayor of the Peruvian capital, Lima, with 11.91%.

Suspense has mounted over who would advance to the June 7 runoff, with the gap between Sánchez and López Aliaga close to 8,000 votes in the most recent results.

They couldn’t be more different politically.

Sánchez, often seen with the wide-brimmed peasant hat that has become his trademark, has promised major economic changes, including a dramatic increase in public spending, sweeping reform of the tax system and partial nationalization of Peru’s natural resources.

López Aliaga, the ultraconservative former mayor of the Peruvian capital, Lima, is focused on a hardline security agenda, proposing to build prisons in the country’s Amazon region, allowing judges to conceal their identities and deport foreigners who live illegally in Peru.

Adding to this narrow margin is the fact that around 1,600 tally sheets are pending in remote villages and abroad. In addition, another 5,000 sheets have been challenged, leaving election courts facing an appeals process that could take weeks.

“In Peru, a percentage of the scorecards are always ‘disputed’ due to potential mathematical errors,” said Álvaro Henzler, president of Transparencia, a democracy monitoring group that has deployed 4,000 observers. “When that happens, they are sent to 60 special election commissions for review.”

In 2021, the Peruvian electoral court announced the results of the first round 37 days after the April 11 vote. But at that time, the gap between the contenders for second place exceeded 238,000 votes from the start, leaving little room for suspense.

“In this case, because the race is very close, the contested scorecards could end up changing the standings; that’s why it takes longer,” Henzler noted.

A presidential candidate needs more than 50% of the vote to win. The two candidates having obtained the most votes in the first round advance to the second round on June 7.

The winner will be Peru’s ninth president in just 10 years and will replace José María Balcázar, who was elected interim president in February. He replaced another interim leader who was ousted over corruption allegations just four months into his term.

In his fourth bid for president, Fujimori promised to crack down on crime, but also championed laws that experts say make it difficult to prosecute criminals. The laws, supported by his party in recent years, removed pretrial detention in some cases and raised the threshold for seizing criminal assets.

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