The candidates for the upcoming presidential election in Peru are 19. Well, actually they are just 17. With only four weeks to go before Election Day on 10 April 2016, the Electoral Council disqualified the outsider contender, Julio Guzmán, because of irregularities in his party’s registration. And it barred another hopeful, César Acuña, for handling out money while campaigning.
“It is unheard of that the Council would not allow to stay in the race two contenders that are supported by 25% of the electorate, and with the polls just four weeks away,” said Professor David Sulmont, director of the Instituto de Opinión Pública of Peru’s Pontificia Universidad in an interview with the Peruvian newspaper La República.
“It’s as if a referee disallowed at the 80th minute a goal scored three minutes after kickoff.” This could turn out to be “decisive as to who will win the presidency, even if that decision is a prerogative of citizens.” All of the public focus “should be on who will be the president for the next five years, rather than on who will be a contender.”
Sunday evening, while I can get no satisfaction echoed from the Estádio Monumental in Lima from the Rolling Stones’ first concert ever in Peru, GfK, a surveys company, released its latest poll, which records some of the uncertainties in the list of candidates.
Keiko Fujimori leads with 34.6% of voting intentions. Considered an experienced hopeful, the daughter of dictator Alberto Fujimori, who ruled with impunity between 1990 and 2000 and is now serving a 25 years prison term for human rights abuses and embezzlement, is one of the youngest candidates.
Defeated in 2011 by incumbent President Ollanta Humala, Fujimori’s second generation is not holding back on any means necessary to win. Authorities rebuked Keiko for “vote buying” (she distributed gifts to potential voters). The way the popular sectors relate to the Fujimori’s holds a paradox. They tend to remember just Fujimori’s welfarism, which they accepted telling themselves that “it did not matter if he stole as long as he got things done.”
Julio Guzmán, the center neoliberal outsider now excluded — barring a positive outcome for his appeal, climbed from 5 to 16.6% in a few weeks’ time owing to many Peruvians dreaming of a President-entrepreneur capable of giving a boost to businesses and investments, taking advantage, for instance, of the free-trade treaty with the US. However, had he a chance to become elected, the former Deloitte man would have faced difficulties in implementing the institutional reforms that every party considers vital. Guzmán is used to closing big deals in ministries rather than lengthy negotiations in critical areas such as education, health care and citizens’ security.
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (Peruanos por el Kambio) comes in third with 6.9%. A former Minister of the Economy during the commodity boom with an approach both technical and political gathers success among center and urban voters.
To the uncertainty about the candidates adds the boredom of faces now seen for over twenty years, such as Alan García’s (4.3%) and Alejandro Toledo’s (1.6%), both former presidents and both probed for wrongdoing, the latter for money laundering, the former for pardoning narco-criminals. Toledo, who studied and taught at Stanford, baffled the public opinion releasing an audio interview while obviously drunk at 8 am.
In the left camp there are two serious candidates: Alfredo Barnechea of Acción Popular and Veronika Mendoza of Frente Amplio. Barnechea, an educated politician, who in the last poll gained consistently, appeals to the upper-middle class in the capital Lima, but has yet to break through among the more popular sectors with his proposals for an industrialization and economic recovery in which the state supports socially the most vulnerable.
His gain now may be a sign that perhaps Peruvians have finally entered election mode.
The elections on 10 April are the first after the collapse of the global demand for commodities. Peru, “the world’s mine“, has however also abundant fish and agricultural resources (the fisheries sector grew in 2015 by 15.9%).
With a growth rate of 3.26% in 2015 against 2.39% in 2014, the Andean country is considered the star in South America. For this pace to be sustainable, however, production factors need to improve according to many economists and to the World Bank. The Fujimori decade resulted in 80% of the all jobs to be informal and in weak unions. This attracted more international capital flows to Peru than to any other Latin American country. The flipside is that workers are low-skilled and productivity is very low.
Understanding the criteria that Peruvians in the cities and in rural areas will use to make a decision at the polls is not easy, because Peru is a truly multiethnic country. Nicolás Lynch, professor of sociology in Lima and in prestigious centers in the US like Johns Hopkins, sheds a light on this. A former minister of Education, he sums it up by explaining that Peruvians suffer of what he calls a “democratic frustration“.
“The political exclusion imposed by neoliberalism after 2000-2001, halted the evolution of representation, suppressing first popular mobilizations and then access to politics. Protesters are now considered criminals, and candidates need to collect millions of signatures to apply. This breaks the transmission belt between society and politics.”
With a few exceptions, according to Professor Lynch, the candidates do not represent the population. “The collapse of the electoral process we are witnessing is nothing less than the collapse of the liberal hegemony.” People forgetting how some governed, and having a sort of nostalgia for authoritarianism or looking for what’s new among the candidates rather than their policies is symptomatic, says Lynch.
If no candidate gains an absolute majority, a ballot takes place in June. The high share of the “vote of the undecided” makes this highly likely. A 36% (45% in rural areas) reflects partly how confused many popular sectors with poor social safety nets are now that the global economic slowdown is hitting their livelihoods for the first time in a decade.
Peru ranks third in the world by extension of tropical forests, which makes it also very vulnerable. This is what happened in February, when an oil pipeline spilled tons of oil that contaminated the water used by 8,000 families, as well as the ecosystem of a major tributary to the Amazon River. The cleanup solutions are getting there with a delay of weeks.
Following Leonardo Di Caprio’s heartfelt appeal to preserve the Amazon Rainforest in his speech at the Academy Awards night, journalist Pedro Canelo suggested to nominate Di Caprio for the presidency of Peru: “He proved to cherish our country much more than Peruvians do.”
“It is unheard of that the Council would not allow to stay in the race two contenders that are supported by 25% of the electorate, and with the polls just four weeks away,” said Professor David Sulmont, director of the Instituto de Opinión Pública of Peru’s Pontificia Universidad in an interview with the Peruvian newspaper La República.
“It’s as if a referee disallowed at the 80th minute a goal scored three minutes after kickoff.” This could turn out to be “decisive as to who will win the presidency, even if that decision is a prerogative of citizens.” All of the public focus “should be on who will be the president for the next five years, rather than on who will be a contender.”
