It’s still too close to call the victor of Peru’s tight presidential election but two exit polls are giving economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski a very slight edge over Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of an imprisoned former president.
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With almost 93 percent of polling stations counted by Monday morning, the 77-year-old Kuczynski had 50.3 percent of the votes compared to 49.7 percent for Fujimori. And a massive anti-Fujimori rally on May 31 focused attention on her family’s dark legacy. He received his professorship in 1924, after serving in the German army in World War I.
Kuczynski, or PPK as he is nearly universally known in Peru, was born in the South American state but educated overseas, beginning his career at the World Bank as an economist before coming back to serve as deputy manager of the Peruvian Central Bank.
With 36 percent of the votes counted, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski had 50.6 percent support compared with 49.4 percent for his rival Keiko Fujimori.
Kuczynski, best known by his initials PPK, urged his supporters to wait for the definitive results, but was confident of victory.
“We are hoping to have a government of consensus”.
Fujimori narrowly lost the presidency to Ollanta Humala in a 2011 runoff after winning the first round by a wide margin.
“I’ve never seen an election in Peru where one candidate fell back and then re-emerged like this”, she said, referring to Kuczynski.
But Fujimori showed no sign of conceding defeat.
Kuczynski, 77, cast his vote at a school in the district of San Isidro, telling voters to “vote with democracy and dialogue in mind, because that is going to save us from corruption, drug trafficking and going under”.
With 95 percent of votes processed by late Monday, Kuczynski led Fujimori by 0.45 percentage points, or just over 74,000 votes.
A potential swing vote in a close race could be the 885,000 Peruvians eligible to vote overseas – about 3.8% of the electorate.
It would be a stunning turnaround for the ex-World Bank economist, who managed to narrow the lead by abandoning his above-the-fray, grandfatherly appeal and hitting Fujimori hard.
Regardless of who wins, Keiko Fujimori has already reshaped Peru’s political landscape.
Fujimori is the daughter of ex-President Alberto Fujimori, now jailed, serving 25 years, for crimes against humanity for ordering death squads to massacre civilians during his attempts to put an end to the Maoist Shining Path rebel group. The most notable scandal was a report that one of her big fundraisers and the secretary general of her party was the target of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration investigation.
Peru is close to choosing its next President, and that person looks to be Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, according to the country’s National Electoral Office (ONPE).
Her running mate, Jose Chlimper, is also in hot water for orchestrating the broadcast of a doctored audio tape in an attempt to clear the name of the party boss. But her lead melted away in the final days of campaigning in Peru’s fourth democratic election since the end of her father Alberto Fujimori’s decade-long rule in 2000.
During the campaign Mr Kuczynski said he would consider allowing Fujimori to finish his prison sentence at home. Instead of rebels, Keiko Fujimori is promising to wield an iron fist against crime, a top voter concern. Among her proposals is building jails in high-altitude prisons in the Andes to punish and isolate unsafe criminals.
Fujimori said in an upbeat speech on Sunday evening that rural votes from “deep Peru” still needed to be counted.
Kuczynski’s Jewish roots have not been an issue during the election campaign, though Fujimori has tried to depict him as part of the white elite establishment that has traditionally overlooked the needs of the poor.
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While Kuczynski’s campaign said it is ready to work with all political groups, supporters of Fujimori expressed doubt that the wounds from the final stretch of the campaign, in which Kuczynski accused Keiko Fujimori of being the harbinger of a “narco-state”, could be easily healed.
