Leftist Pedro Castillo is edging closer to electoral triumph in Peru (Update 2)

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Seemingly inexorably, far-left candidate Pedro Castillo is edging closer to victory in the Peruvian presidential elections as the votes are being counted this Monday; the trade unionist schoolteacher is slowly but surely gaining distance from right-wing Keiko Fujimori.

With 93.3% of the tallies counted, Castillo leads the count with 50.16% of the votes, a margin of more than 55,000. He maintains a growing trend over his rival since the first official data of the recount were released.

It is not yet possible to confirm the victory of the candidate, who, if he wins, would be the first president of the country not part of the Lima elite, who have dominated the history of the country since colonial times. The distance between the contenders is still minimal and the variables of any recount are multitudinous.

However, the mathematical margins for Fujimori, who so far has 49.83% of the votes, seem to be shrinking by the minute.

RURAL AND OVERSEAS VOTE

The vast majority of the vote of Peruvians abroad has yet to be counted; these are several thousand votes in which, as the count progresses, Fujimori will obtain greater support.

But there are also thousands of votes from the rural interior, where Castillo’s supporters are more than 80%.

The race is then on to see if Fujimori is capable of making up the distance that already separates her from Castillo and the weight of the peasant vote that sustains the candidate of the leftist Peru Libre party.

Moreover, Fujimori is seeing how the vote is almost mirroring the quick count estimates made last night by pollster Ipsos, which gave Castillo the victory by 0.4 percentage points. To date, the Ipsos quick count has never failed to predict the electoral winner in Peru.

Read also: Analysis – Some conclusions from the Peruvian presidential vote

CALM AND EXPECTATION

As the recount drama unfolds, the candidates and their supporters have remained calm, and the citizens did not stop crunching numbers and statistical calculations to figure out who would win and by how much.

Castillo traveled early in the morning from Chota, where he voted on Sunday night, to Lima, where he arrived around midday and took refuge in his party’s headquarters.

At first, he announced that he would give a press conference, although shortly afterwards his appearance was canceled, and official silence from the Peru Libre campaign followed.

Fujimori, for her part, locked herself in her Lima headquarters earlier in the day and was not seen again.

The one person who did speak was interim president Francisco Sagasti, who during the celebration of a military act indicated that the results of the second round are “a clear and firm call for reconciliation and national unity”, while at the same time calling for the union of Peruvians “respecting our differences and without belittling each other.”

“(The results) are an imperative mandate to agree on the course that Peru has to take at the beginning of our third century of independent life; we are all called to defend the flag of our country in union and fraternity, respecting our differences,” said the president, who will hand over power to his successor on July 28.

TWO OPPOSING OPTIONS

For candidate Fujimori, this situation is, so far, a déjà vu – five years ago, in 2016, she lost the runoff against Pedro Pablo Kuczynski by only 40,000 votes, after months of being ahead in the polls and despite arriving with a polling advantage on election night.

Fujimori, who also lost in the second round of the 2011 presidential elections to Ollanta Humala, will almost certainly face trial if she is defeated; she has been accused of money laundering, for which the prosecution is asking more than 30 years in prison.

This legal situation has been one of the burdens of her campaign in which her unpopularity has been one of the central issues.

For this reason, she presented this election as a referendum between “freedom and communism” and in defense of the neoliberal economic model established by her father, which polarized the entire campaign.

The candidate of the pro-Fujimori party, Fuerza Popular, advocates the continuation of the system implemented by her father 30 years ago, with an open market and promotion of private investment that has allowed the country to grow by leaps and bounds in recent decades.

The front-runner Castillo, a teacher and union leader, advocates profound reforms that include a new Constitution and the nationalization of natural resources, as he claims that Peru’s economic progress has only benefited the wealthiest classes and has not solved the deep social gaps.

The winner will take office on July 28, the day on which Peru will commemorate 200 years of its independence, a celebration saddened by the economic and health crisis, with more than 180,000 deaths due to the Covid-19 pandemic, making it the country with the highest coronavirus mortality rate in the world proportional to its population.