Peru Set To Choose From A Bewildering Array Of 35 Presidential Hopefuls

Peruvians will choose from a bewildering array of 35 presidential candidates this Sunday, electing the next leader of an Andean nation beset by crime and a string of short-lived, scandal-tainted presidencies.

“Now any old person runs for office,” said 51-year-old teacher Jane Layza, pondering the plethora of presidential hopefuls, and how she will cast her ballot.

A few in the field are well known – a popular male comic, the daughter of a brutal autocrat, and a former Lima mayor who likens himself to a cartoon pig.

But no candidate was polling above the teens, and it was unlikely any would break the 50 per cent threshold needed to avoid a run-off. That has been frustrating news for fed-up Peruvians.

Pocked with stifling jungles, brilliant snowcapped peaks, and bone-dry deserts, this crucible of the Inca Empire has in recent years struggled with chronic political instability and a surge in organised crime.

The country has had eight presidents in the last decade. So many have been removed from office and jailed that they have a specialised prison of their own.

Some of Peru’s presidential candidates. Photo: AFP

Latinobarometro pollsters found more than 90 per cent of Peruvians have “little” or “no confidence” in their government and parliament, the highest figures in Latin America.

“I’m not going to vote for anyone who is in government today, that much is very clear,” said 56-year-old shopkeeper Nancy Chuqui.

In the last decade, the homicide rate has more than doubled.

Peruvian police once received 3,200 reports of extortion a year. Now they get at least 26,500 – and that was unlikely to be the full total.

It was not just that criminality has increased in volume, according to sociologist Patricia Zarate. “What has changed is the harshness, the intensity of crime: extortion, attacks, murders,” she said.

A kaleidoscope of foreign criminal gangs from Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico compete with home-grown rivals for control of lucrative trafficking routes and other illicit business.

The Presidential Palace in Lima. Photo: AFP

According to Zarate, voters “believe that politics is not only associated with corruption, but also with organised crime,” and they expect “more of the same” from any new leader.

Paradoxically, the Peruvian economy has remained one of the most stable in the region, with the lowest inflation in Latin America and growing mining exports.

Polls suggest that Peruvians, like many in Latin America, were looking to right-wing candidates for answers. But experts has said the election could throw up a surprise.

In 2021, leftist Pedro Castillo polled in seventh place a week before the first round, but eventually won.

This time around, candidates have tried to break through to voters with last-minute, headline-grabbing promises on crime.

Former Lima mayor Rafael Lopez Aliaga, aka “Porky”, vowed to send criminals to Amazon jails ringed with deadly snakes.

Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the polarising late president Alberto Fujimori and a perennial candidate for the top job herself, has led polls in the final days of the campaign. This would be her fourth attempt to win the presidency.

The US-educated business administrator, who is of Japanese descent, presents herself as the safest pair of hands to take on the extortion gangs and hitmen terrorising Peru.

She has capitalised on nostalgia for the rule of her father, still revered by many in Peru for crushing a bloody leftist insurgency in the 1990s despite signing off on massacres, for which he spent 16 years behind bars.

“Our country needs order. And we already achieved that” in the 1990s, Keiko Fujimori argued during a recent TV debate.

If elected, Fujimori has said that prisoners would have to work for their food.

She would also withdraw Peru from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in order to establish “faceless” courts, where judges with concealed faces would try suspects.

The last Ipsos poll conducted before the election gave her 15 per cent of the vote.

Voting is compulsory for about 27 million Peruvians, out of a total population of 34 million.

Incumbent Jose Maria Balcazar, interim president for less than two months, has been barred from running.

According to Ipsos, a third of voters remain undecided, or plan to cast a blank or spoiled ballot.

Political scientist Eduardo Dargent said many Peruvians would vote with little or no information.

There were so many candidates that there was no way to get to know them all, he said.