Aides to front-runner Pedro Pablo Kuczynski on Wednesday demanded that Peru’s top electoral authority speed up the counting.
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Ex-economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has won the majority of votes in Peru’s presidential election.
In a press conference this afternoon, Mariano Cucho, head of the elections office, ONPE, said that 100% of the ballot records have been processed, with the results giving Pedro Pablo Kuczynski 50.12% of the votes and Keiko Fujimori’s 49.88%.
Three days after Sunday’s runoff election, the race to lead one of Latin America’s fastest-growing economies was still too close to officially call, even though 99.5 percent of the ballots had been counted.
Kuczynski, a centrist economist known in Peru by his initials PPK, said he would wait for a complete count before claiming victory as thousands of disputed or unclear ballots remained uncounted.
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But her apparent defeat does not mean the Fujimori name is politically dead in Peru.
Still being counted were the ballots cast by an estimated 885,000 Peruvians eligible to vote overseas.
Her supporter, congressman Pedro Spadaro, told the press after the result was announced that “the JNE will have the final word on the entire electoral process”. After electoral authorities presented their results Thursday, she left her campaign headquarters, where she was holed up in meetings all day, and returned to her home without making any remarks to the throngs of journalists waiting outside. However, with each bundle holding up to 300 votes, they would only be enough to offset Kuczynski’s lead if almost all were decided in Fujimori’s favor.
The inauguration of Peru’s new leader will take place on July 28. If she had won, she would have become Peru’s first female president.
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Kuczynski led throughout the count, but there was a point mid-week, with about 94% counted, when his lead dropped sharply enough to give hope to Fujimori’s supporters. His party will control just 18 congressional seats, behind Fujimori’s 73 and a leftist party’s 20.
