That made the tight battle for second crucial as no other candidate has expressed any intention of seriously shaking up the economic status quo.
Technically tied for second in an election-eve poll were Keiko Fujimori, 35-year-old daughter of the imprisoned former President Alberto Fujimori whom Peruvians alternately adore and vilify, and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a 72-year-old former World Bank economist and investment banker. Trailing them was Alejandro Toledo, Peru’s president from 2001-2006.
Frontrunner Ollanta Humala, who has spooked foreign capital by promising a greater state role in the economy and exporting less natural gas while making it cheaper for Peruvians, prevailed in the first round of the 2006 presidential election only to lose a runoff.
This resource-rich, corruption-bedeviled Andean nation has been notorious for its volatile politics since the 1980s, when its discredited political parties all but dissolved and elections became more about personality than ideology.
And Sunday’s vote — whose two top vote-getters will meet in a June 5 runoff — promises to be the most unpredictable in decades.
Humala was preferred by 28.1 percent of voters in an Ipsos-Apoyo poll of 6,000 voters Saturday, followed by Fujimori with 21.1 percent; Kuczynski with 19.9 percent; and Toledo with 16.8 percent. The poll had an error margin of 1.6 percentage points.
Peruvian law prohibits the domestic publishing of opinion polls in the campaign’s final week.
Kuczynski, a German immigrant’s son who was economics and prime minister under Toledo, climbed into contention from single digit showings in the poll in the campaign’s final month, during which he renounced his dual US citizenship.
Nevertheless, analysts say about 11 percent of the electorate remain undecided and the electorate is even more fragmented than in 2006, when outgoing President Alan Garcia beat Humala, 53 percent to 47 percent.
That result was widely seen as a rebuff of leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who had openly backed Humala.
Humala, 48, now eschews all association with Chavez. This time he has enlisted Brazilian advisers allied with that country’s governing Worker’s Party. And he has largely dispensed with his firebrand rhetoric, though it re-emerged in final rallies, where he promised “a great redistribution of wealth.” Humala surged into the lead in the campaign’s final days with populist promises of free nursery school and public education, state-funded school breakfasts and lunches, a big boost in the minimum wage and pensions for all beginning at age 65.
Keiko Fujimori has made similar promises in this country of 30 million where one in three Peruvians lives on less than $3 a day and lacks running water.
But, unlike Humala, Fujimori is a free-market defender.
While Humala says he would respect international treaties and contracts — 60 percent of Peru’s exports are from mining — many Peruvians don’t believe him.
Humala advocates rewriting the constitution, just as Chavez and his leftist allies in Bolivia and Ecuador have done, to make it easier to enact his agenda. He says he does not, however, seek to include re-election, as Chavez did to stay in office.
Humala as an agent of change appeals to the lower classes, who make up a majority.
“Thirty-seven to 38 percent in the polls say they want a radical change in the economic model. And then another third broadly agrees with the status quo but wants greater redistribution,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky.
An economic boom from higher global commodity prices — Peru is a top exporter of copper, gold, silver and other metals — that has averaged 7 percent over the past five years simply hasn’t trickled down to the poor.
Humala’s biggest draw may be his anti-corruption plank — he wants to give voters the right to oust any elected official by recall. Last year, Peru was ranked 78th out of 178 countries in the global corruption index of Transparency International, tied with China and Serbia.
“Many demand change, which helps account for Humala’s rise, but they don’t favor destruction of the whole system, as in Venezuela and Ecuador in recent years. They want a fairer distribution of the fruits of growth and also less corruption,” said Michael Shifter, president of the nonpartisan Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington.
Fujimori has a rock-solid constituency thanks to her father’s defeat of the Maoist-inspired Shining Path insurgency, taming of hyperinflation in the 1990s and delivering of basic service to long-neglected backwaters.
But Alberto Fujimori is now serving a 25-year sentence for corruption and authorizing death squad killings and his daughter’s campaign and congressional slate are jammed with his former Cabinet ministers and other loyalists. Foes contend he would call the shots from his comfortable police station cell, becoming the eminence grise behind a Keiko presidency.
Toledo, 65, squandered an early lead in the campaign, analysts say, by diluting his early message of greater economic justice, including a greater share of mining royalties for Peruvians.
Opinion polls show he would defeat Humala in a second round while Kuczynski and Fujimori would have a harder time against the “comandante.” Kuczynski’s skin color is a liability in a country where the European-descended economic elite is encountering the same backlash of resentment it has experienced in neighboring Bolivia by natives who have long been excluded from power.
He has been slammed in left-of-center news media for representing foreign interests seeking to get rich of Peru’s minerals and is favored by the wealthy and well-educated.
