Kuczynski’s father was a renowned pathologist and one of Peru’s leading public health administrators, pioneering the treatment of leprosy in Peru. He received his professorship in 1924, after serving in the German army in World War I. A centre-right liberal, Mr. Kuczynski served as finance minister, mining minister and prime minister.
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His technocrat’s career was cut short in 1968, when he lost his job during a military coup. Before moving to Miami, Kuczynski split his time between Washington D.C. where his first wife and three kids lived and New York City where he worked.
While disputes over ballots are typical in Peru, where voting is mandatory and volunteer observers can lodge complaints, they have not played a significant role in recent presidential elections that ended with candidates conceding defeat before a full vote count is complete.
The runoff election has raised the specter of Peru’s dark past.
With 91 percent of the votes counted, Kuczynski had 50.32 percent to Fujimori’s 49.68 percent.
Addressing cheering supporters from the balcony of his campaign headquarters, the former World Bank economist urged them to be vigilant against fraud at the ballot box but otherwise sounded as if he had already been declared the victor.
Referring to any future government, Kuczynski said “we’re conciliatory and therefore we’ll be able to govern Peru towards a brighter future”. “No more low blows or fights”, he said Sunday.
THE outcome of Peru’s presidential election run-off on June 5th was supposed to be a foregone conclusion.
The vote was seen largely as a referendum on the legacy of Alberto Fujimori, an iron-handed ruler who led the nation for a decade in the 1990s. Just a week ago, Fujimori, 41, a former congresswoman, led Pedro Pablo Kuczynski by about five percentage points in some polls.
About 23 million Peruvians are eligible to vote, 900,000 from outside the country. Polling experts said it would be nearly impossible for Keiko, as she is known in Peru, to turn that lead around.
Kuczynski, from a balcony at his campaign headquarters in Lima’s Miraflores district, offered his supporters a similar, but terser, message, calling for patience, but adding the need for vigilance to detect any possible shenanigans at local voting stations where ballots were still being tallied for delivery to ONPE.
Kuczynski, a former Wall Street investor, has pledged to spur employment and promote economic growth, while Fujimori – the daughter of Peru’s former president Alberto Fujimori, now in jail for crimes against humanity – has vowed to tackle crime. Peru is the world’s largest producer of cocaine.
Meanwhile, former leftist candidate Veronika Mendoza told teleSUR that preliminary results show that Peruvians reject a government connected to drug trafficking and former dictator Alberto Fujimori. Kuczynski during the campaign said he’d consider allowing Fujimori finish his prison sentence at home.
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Heading into the vote, the top voter concern was crime, an area in which respondents gave Fujimori the edge in the polls. Among her proposals is building jails in high-altitude prisons in the Andes to punish and isolate unsafe criminals.
