Fujimori leads in Peru election’s first round

LIMA, PERU, April 11: The daughter of jailed former President Alberto Fujimori held a strong lead Monday in preliminary results from the first round of Peru’s presidential election and appeared headed to a showdown with another center-right candidate in a June runoff.
With 67 percent of the ballots counted, Keiko Fujimori had 39 percent of the vote, while former World Bank economist Pedro Kuczynski held 24 percent. Leftist congresswoman Veronika Mendoza, who had made a late surge in pre-election polls, was in third at 17 percent.
Final results were not expected until later Monday, but Kuczynski’s supporters celebrated in the streets outside his campaign headquarters in Lima after two unofficial quick counts indicated he would edge out Mendoza for the right to face Fujimori on June 5. Such counts have been reliable predictors of results in previous Peruvian elections.
Fujimori was the front-runner for months and looked poised to outdo even the most-optimistic first round scenarios in polls published on the eve of voting.
But she will face an uphill battle in the second round because of how polarizing a figure her father remains among Peruvians.
While Alberto Fujimori is remembered fondly by many, especially in the long-overlooked countryside, for defeating Maoist-inspired Shining Path rebels and taming hyperinflation, he is detested by large segments of the urban middle class for human rights abuses and his order for the military to shut down Congress. Almost half of Peruvians surveyed said they would never vote for anyone associated with the former leader and thousands took to the streets a week ago to warn that Keiko Fujimori’s election could bring back authoritarian rule. In a bid to project a more moderate image, Fujimori promised during her campaign not to pardon her father, who is serving a 25-year sentence for authorizing death squads during his decade-long rule starting in 1990. On Sunday night, she told supporters it was time to bury the past.
“Peruvians want reconciliation and don’t want to fight anymore,” she told supporters while standing on a truck parked outside a luxury Lima hotel.
If Kuczynski holds on to the No. 2 spot, it will ensure Peru continues along a free-market path after Mendoza’s rise in the polls spooked investors. It also represents another setback for South America’s left, which after sweeping into power across much of the region during the past decade’s commodities boom has suffered a string of electoral losses in Argentina, Bolivia and Venezuela. After finishing a strong third in the 2011 election, Kuczynski threw his support behind Keiko Fujimori in that year’s runoff. He later said he regretted that decision but considered it necessary in trying to prevent the election of leftist Ollanta Humala, who held close ties to socialist Venezuela and had led an army rebellion in his youth. Once in office, however, Humala kept up a pro-business policy framework. -AP