As Pedro Castillo nears victory
Lima, Peru – The official result has yet to be declared but Pedro Castillo appears all but certain to be Peru’s next president.
The radical-left outsider will face an uphill struggle to
unite the bitterly divided Andean nation, however, and the most urgent question
will be whether he moderates his politics or insists on the Marxist policies in
his Free Peru party manifesto.
Those proposals include making Peru’s vast mining sector
leave 70 percent of its profits in the country, nationalising the media, and
spending 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on education and healthcare
– more than the country has ever raised in tax revenues.
With all of the 18.8 million votes cast in the June 6
presidential runoff now counted, Castillo has 50.15 percent support, giving him
a razor-thin lead of just more than 50,000 votes against his hard-right
opponent Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the jailed 1990s president Alberto
Fujimori.
She has cried fraud – despite international observers giving
the elections a clean bill of health – and this week hired some of Lima’s top
lawyers in an attempt to annul 200,000 votes, mainly from impoverished rural
areas in the Andes and Amazon where Castillo won overwhelmingly, in some cases
with more than 80 percent support.
But Fujimori’s effort, which is unprecedented in Peruvian
electoral history and has delayed the official declaration of a winner, appears
to have failed.
Peru’s National Electoral Tribunal (JNA, according to its
Spanish acronym) ruled on Friday that most of her challenges had come after the
legal deadline. There are now just less than 40,000 votes still in play, not
enough to overturn the result.
Deeply polarised
Nevertheless, the last-ditch effort by Fujimori, 46, who
faces trial and a potentially lengthy jail sentence for alleged money
laundering, has further polarised Peru after the divisive presidential
campaign.
Many commentators have noted how her legal team, made up
largely of white lawyers, was effectively attempting to disenfranchise
Indigenous and mixed race voters.
“It’s part of our political and legal culture, all this
paperwork,” Arturo Maldonado, a political scientist at the Pontifical Catholic
University of Peru, told Al Jazeera. “This is a candidate who has everything to
lose and is using these tricks to win in the tribunal what she couldn’t do on
the pitch.”
Fujimori’s refusal to concede has likely also increased the
challenges Castillo, 51, a provincial schoolteacher and union leader, will face
to establish his legitimacy in office.
The two deeply unpopular candidates received just 13 percent
and 19 percent, respectively, in the crowded first round, and the runoff was
viewed by most Peruvians as a vote for the candidate deemed the lesser of two
evils.
With no experience in public office, and having frequently
contradicted himself on the campaign trail, Castillo will face a splintered and
right-leaning incoming Congress that is unlikely to sign off on his economic
plans, especially any nationalisations.
He will also face the risk of impeachment, with or without
cause. The outgoing Congress established that precedent last November when it
removed then-President Martín Vizcarra from office on the basis of corruption
allegations that were not just unproven but had yet to be seriously
investigated.
“It’s possible Castillo just turns his back on Congress and
tries to govern by plebiscite,” said Maldonado.
Two cases will serve as early litmus tests. The first is
Keiko Fujimori’s, in which prosecutors are demanding a 31-year sentence on
money laundering charges that she denies, while the second is that of Vladimir
Cerrón, the former regional governor and Cuban-educated surgeon who founded
Free Peru.
Cerrón had picked the little-known Castillo to replace him
on the presidential ticket after he was barred from running for the presidency
because of a corruption conviction. On Thursday, a court controversially
overturned his conviction and four-year suspended sentence. The judge is now
being investigated, and Cerrón, who many Peruvians believe will be the backseat
driver in the Castillo administration, faces half a dozen more fraud
investigations.
Cerrón frequently made controversial comments suggesting he,
not Castillo, was leading the campaign. The presidential candidate sought to
play that down, however, insisting in one instance that his mentor would not
even be hired as a “janitor” in his administration.
“Castillo needs to do much more to clearly distance himself
from Cerrón,” said Samuel Rotta, who heads the Peruvian chapter of Transparency
International. “His presidency could depend on it, but so could his
anti-corruption strategy.”
Meanwhile, the mood has been tense in Peru as the country
waits for the final result. The legal challenges are expected to run into next
week, delaying the start of the transition as the coronavirus pandemic
continues to sweep the country.
Fujimori supporters were picketing the offices of the
electoral agency, ONPE, and the homes of the head of the JNE and ONPE. Interim
President Francisco Sagasti has called on both sides to avoid declaring victory
before the official result is announced, prompting some lawmakers to even
suggest censuring him for supposedly being biased against Fujimori.
Anna Luisa Burga, 46, a historian from Castillo’s native
Cajamarca who now lives in Lima, summed up the mood of many Peruvians who had
reluctantly voted for Castillo and are now hoping that the untested apparent
new president-elect will be able to rise to his enormous new responsibilities.
“I didn’t vote for him in the first round, and I wasn’t
going to vote for him in the second round, but then came this wave of racism,
classism and discrimination, and I decided it was important, including for the
symbolism, to have a president like Castillo,” she told Al Jazeera.
“I still have my doubts, and I think it is going to be very
difficult for him. But I just hope for his enlightenment, and that he surrounds
himself with good people.”
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