Peru left guessing on runoff as outcome too close to call

Peruvians were on Monday no closer to knowing who their next leader will be as vote counting in a presidential runoff election went down to the wire.

With just over 95 percent of the votes tallied by late afternoon local time, the poll remained too close to call. Left-leaning candidate Pedro Castillo had taken the slimmest of leads over Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of former right-wing president Alberto Fujimori.

Peruvians went to the polls on Sunday to pick between union leader Castillo and Fujimori, who heads the conservative Popular Force party.

The National Office of Electoral Processes said on Monday that, by 5 pm local time, the two candidates were just 81,853 votes apart with less than 5 percent of the ballots outstanding. Both candidates received more than 8.4 million votes each. The ballots that remain to be counted are from hard-to-reach rural areas and from Peruvians abroad.

"It is dramatic," said Ramon Abasolo, a lawyer and political analyst in the capital Lima. "The night of the elections, the winner was Keiko Fujimori. Now the results have flipped.

"People who were expecting a victory for Keiko Fujimori have faith in the vote of the Peruvians living abroad, but the tally sheets have not yet arrived. Probably on June 8 or June 9, we will know the winner," Abasolo said.

Fujimori had lost two previous polls and was beaten in 2016 by just around 42,000 votes.

People living abroad understand how important their votes are this time around.

"The vote from the countryside and the votes of Peruvians living abroad will decide it all," said Bruno Lizzetti, a Peruvian political science student living in Spain.

In the streets of Peru, anxious citizens await a final result as the ballots from distant rural areas trickle in.

Such is the case with Oscar Rodriguez, a food trader in Lima and one of the millions seeking out the latest news.

"Peru is in the midst of an economic and moral crisis. This has taken us into an electoral crisis," Rodriguez said. "There were a lot of hate campaigns in the media during the election campaign and while people have been worried about sick relatives during the pandemic or bankrupt businesses due to the COVID-19 crisis, people have not paid close attention to the platforms and have left themselves to be guided by the opinion polls."

Concerns voiced

Rodriguez said he is worried about the close results and the possible consequences of a disputed election.

The support that Castillo has received from rural areas may be a call for change, given that Peru is highly centralized, with about a third of its population of around 33 million people living in the capital.

"We must take care of the rural votes like gold, which will define the results, which must be favorable to Castillo," tweeted Vladimir Cerron, a political leader and head of Castillo's Free Peru party.

Castillo's campaign has guaranteed that a clean result will be honored.

"We ask for the constitutional guarantee of the due vote count …we ask for the scanning of the minutes to check, one by one, the vote count that will be performed and reviewed by the representatives of both political parties," Castillo's campaign team said in a statement.

Agencies contributed to this story.

The writer is a freelance journalist for China Daily.