With 99.5 percent of the vote counted from Sunday’s runoff vote, former International Monetary Fund official Pedro Pablo Kuczynski holds a 0.23 point edge over Keiko Fujimori, the right-wing daughter of the imprisoned former president Alberto Fujimori.
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Outgoing President Ollanta Humala and the leaders of Colombia, Chile, Argentina and Mexico congratulated Kuczynski after the latest official results on Thursday made it almost impossible for Fujimori to catch up even though Kuczynski led by only 40,000 votes.
It cautioned, however, that thousands of unclear votes from Sunday’s run-off still had to be examined by electoral scrutineers.
However, pollsters say it would be virtually impossible for Fujimori, the daughter of jailed ex-president Alberto Fujimori, to win.
“We’re going to work for all Peruvians”, Kuczynski told a news conference. “We take this virtual verdict with much modesty”.
Outgoing President Ollanta Humala and the leaders of Colombia, Chile and Argentina congratulated Kuczynski, a former investment banker, after the results were announced.
But he has faced scrutiny over his close relationship to Peru’s business elite.
Kuczynski has promised to invest in infrastructure projects and lower sales taxes to revive economic growth that has slowed with tumbling mineral prices.
During the campaign, the 41-year-old Fujimori argued that Kuczynski’s advanced age was a hindrance.
While the gap has fluctuated somewhat in recent days, Fujimori has trailed throughout the vote count.
Congressman Pedro Spadaro and congressman-elect Daniel Salaverry said party members had detected electoral irregularities at polling stations in the Amazon and the United States and were asking authorities to annul those votes, some of which had already been counted.
Some 140 bundles of ballots were still under review by authorities late on Thursday.
Fujimori remained largely silent amid growing calls for her to congratulate Kuczynski.
Dozens of supporters of Fujimori have held demonstrations outside the electoral board to denounce what they said was fraud, even though neither the candidate nor her campaign have presented any evidence to back up their supporters’ claims. A spokesman earlier said she would fight to the end.
If given the chance to govern, he’s likely to seek out her support despite having come from well behind in pre-election polls thanks to the support of the left, which on the eve of voting staged an anti-Fujimori protest that was Peru’s biggest in 16 years. Aides in both campaigns were jockeying for positions in an eventual alliance in congress, where Fujimori’s party won a solid majority of 73 of 130 seats.
It was the Andean nation’s tightest election in half a century.
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A former prime minister, Kuczynski dismissed Fujimori’s tough stance on crime, including promises to build prisons high in the Andes to isolate prisoners, as myopic and cruel.
