In attempts to win over the emerging middle class, the ex-army officer tries to distance himself from Chávez
PERU’S VOTERS are set to demand more time before electing a new president, with no candidate likely to win enough support to declare outright victory in Sunday’s general election.
A surge of support in the campaign’s final stretch has seen former army officer turned firebrand populist Ollanta Humala emerge as the favourite to grab first place, though with just 26 per cent in recent polls he is far from getting the 50 per cent plus one vote needed to avoid a run-off round on June 5th.
Behind Mr Humala there is a fierce battle for the second spot in the run-off. Former president Alejandro Toledo is in a three-way race with his own former prime minister, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, and Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori, who is serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses and corruption. All three are in a technical tie on about 20 per cent.
Further back is one-time race leader Luis Castañeda, a former mayor of the capital, Lima.
Peru’s financial markets have been rattled by the rise of Mr Humala, despite the candidate having toned down his attacks on foreign investors and distanced himself from his one-time ally, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez.
In contrast to the populist rhetoric of Mr Humala, the other leading candidates all promise to maintain the current market-friendly economic model which has transformed Peru into one of the world’s best performing economies in the last decade. Chinese demand and investment has seen a massive expansion in mining, with Peru now a major global supplier of copper, zinc, silver and gold. Over a decade of macro-economic stability has produced a consumer boom in the cities and millions have been lifted out of poverty.
In an attempt not to scare off this emerging middle class Mr Humala in his stump speech now says instead of seeking to emulate the confrontational and economically chaotic Bolivarian Revolution of Mr Chávez he will model his presidency on that of the more moderate left-wing former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Mr Humala mainly draws his support from the third of the population that has largely been left behind by the country’s boom. Most of these poor are of indigenous descent and respond to Mr Humala’s claims that a European-descended elite control too much of the country’s wealth.
But despite the attempted makeover many Peruvians remain suspicious of the former leader of a failed military insurrection. Mr Humala was left flustered when a television anchor asked him if Venezuela was a dictatorship under Mr Chávez, a deeply unpopular figure in Peru.
“Humala has distanced himself from Venezuela and Chávez and now says he wants to be more like Lula. But his own plan for government says the exact opposite,” says Victor Andres Ponce, a political analyst in Lima. “In his plan he speaks of nationalisation, holding an assembly to redraw the constitution and controls over the media. There is a contradiction between what he says in speeches and his own plan for government. Therefore many people do not believe him and suspect his ‘suaveness’ on the campaign trail is merely a ploy for winning votes.”
But if polls show most Peruvians want to maintain the country’s current course, they also show they are little inspired by the politicians promising to do so. Ms Fujimori’s whole political career at times has sounded like an apologia for her jailed father. During his decade-long dictatorship he defeated a raging Maoist insurgency and rampant inflation but also oversaw massive corruption and a network of death squads that killed tens of thousands in a vicious counter-insurgency campaign.
Mr Toledo put in place much of the groundwork for the current boom after he helped topple Mr Fujimori but is seen as arrogant, while Mr Kuczynski suffers from being a member of the white elite in a country where racial tensions between Europeans and descendants of the indigenous peoples always simmers just below the surface.
Causing much of the public disillusionment with politicians is the archaic state apparatus they command, which has failed to modernise in step with the rapidly transforming economy. “In Peru it is the state that has failed not the market,” notes Mr Ponce.
“The state has more money than it ever had before but it does not have the institutional architecture to spend and distribute it.”