Two candidates with completely different visions for Peru fight for a spot in the presidential election runoff

(Patria) - The results of the presidential elections in Peru, released on Thursday, showed such a tight race for second and third place that it could take several weeks to determine the two leading candidates for the country's mandatory June runoff election, AP reported.

A nationalist congressman allied with a jailed former president and an ultraconservative politician who promises to reinstate the death penalty are the leading candidates to face Keiko Fujimori, who took first place among 35 candidates in Sunday's election.

With 93% of ballots counted, official results on Tuesday showed Fujimori, the conservative daughter of disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori, leading with 17.06%, although far below the fifty percent needed to avoid a runoff.
Behind her, Roberto Sánchez, a nationalist congressman and former minister under jailed former President Pedro Castillo, had 11.97%. Third, narrowly behind him, was Rafael López Aliaga, an ultraconservative former mayor of Peru's capital, Lima, with 11.91%.

Uncertainty over who would qualify for the June 7 runoff election grew, with the gap between Sánchez and López Aliaga closer than 8,000 votes in the latest results.
Politically, they could not be more different.

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

López Aliaga, an ultraconservative former mayor of Peru's capital, Lima, is focused on a hardline security agenda, proposing the construction of a prison in the Amazon region, allowing judges to conceal their identities and deporting foreigners living illegally in Peru.

A complicated verification system

The tight margin is further complicated by about 1,600 ballots for vote counting from remote villages and abroad. Additionally, another 5,000 ballots are being challenged, leaving electoral tribunals with an appeals process that could take weeks to resolve.

“In Peru, a certain percentage of vote-counting ballots are always 'challenged' due to potential mathematical errors,” explained Álvaro Henzler, president of Transparencia, an election watchdog group that deployed 4,000 observers.

“When this happens, they are sent before sixty special electoral committees for review.”

Peru's electoral tribunal declared the first-round results in 2021 37 days after the April 11 vote. However, at that time, the gap between the second- and third-place candidates exceeded 238,000 votes from the start, leaving little room for uncertainty.

“In this case, since the race is so tight, the challenged vote-counting ballots could end up changing the ranking. That's why it's taking longer,” Henzler noted.

A presidential candidate needs more than fifty percent of the votes to win in the first round. The two candidates with the most votes in the first round advance to the June 7 runoff election.

The winner will be Peru's ninth president in just ten years and will succeed José María Balcázar, who was elected interim president in February.

Balcázar replaced another interim leader who was ousted on corruption charges just four months into his term.

In her fourth bid for the presidency, Fujimori has promised a crackdown on crime but has also defended laws that experts say make it harder to prosecute criminals.

The laws, which her party has supported in recent years, have eliminated pretrial detention in certain cases and raised the threshold for seizing assets acquired through criminal activity.