PERU: Decision time
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PERU: Decision time

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The race to win Peru’s presidential election on April 10 is still open, with five of the 11 candidates looking like frontrunners

Teresa Rojas appears unfazed by the massive number of political banners and signs fighting for space along the streets of an open-air market where she shops in Lima, Peru’s capital.

The vegetable stand where she haggles over prices is surrounded by signs promoting the 11 presidential candidates and dozens of congressional candidates for the upcoming April 10 general elections. The normal buzz of vendors and clients is pierced by car-mounted loudspeakers plugging candidates.

Rojas says she is still undecided on a presidential candidate, but expects her top two options to do well on April 10 and move on to a runoff in early June. Under Peruvian legislation, if no candidate receives more than 50% of the vote on election day, the top two finishers face each other in a second round of voting.

“Honestly, I have not decided. They all seem to be saying the same thing right now,” Rojas says. “I think the choice might be harder in the runoff.”

There are two crops of candidates in the race as the election approaches. Five candidates are given a chance – some much better than others – to finish first or second on election day. The remaining six candidates each poll below 1% in national surveys.

The frontrunner is former president Alejandro Toledo, but his numbers are still low. He is polling around 30% in national surveys. Analysts expect him to be in the runoff. While Toledo was unpopular during his first term, his problems were primarily personal in nature, and voters today seem focused on his economic achievements.

He remains the only president in Peru’s modern history who can claim that GDP expanded every month he was in office. Inflation was low, exports boomed, and foreign reserves more than tripled under his watch. He is also credited with concluding negotiations for a free-trade agreement with the US, which paved the way for subsequent deals with Canada, Chile, China and the European Union, among others.

Toledo is promising more of the same, but this time without the gaffes that drove his popularity down to single digits at times. “The good will be kept, and the mistakes will not be repeated. Five years in the presidency and the past years teaching and observing have taught me many things,” he says.

Who he will face in the runoff is anyone’s guess in the final stretch of the race.

The second place spot has shifted during the past few months between Luis Castañeda, who was Lima’s mayor for eight years before stepping down in September to run for president, and congresswoman Keiko Fujimori.

Castañeda is betting on his mayoral tenure to put him over the top, while Fujimori is banking on the strength of her last name. She is the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, who is in prison, serving a lengthy sentence for corruption and human rights violations. However, he is still remembered for having defeated the twin evils of hyperinflation and terrorism, which plagued Peru when he took office.

That said, the massive corruption scandal that led to the collapse of his regime also weighs against her. Castañeda and Fujimori are polling between 18% and 20% in most polls.

AND THE SLEEPERS

The final two candidates in the leading pack, Ollanta Humala and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, both believe sleeper votes will give them the edge. Humala, the only left-leaning candidate in the race, has been creeping up in the polls and was at 15% at the start of March. Kuczynski, widely known in Peru and international banking circles as PPK, is polling at under 10%, but he maintains that his numbers are much higher.

Humala narrowly lost the 2006 race to Alan García, who is barred from seeking immediate re-election to another five-year term as president. PPK was twice finance minister and cabinet chief in Toledo’s first term. Since leaving government he has worked with the Rohatyn Group and was in charge of putting together the IDB’s capital increase proposal in 2009-10.

PPK recognizes that voters like Rojas could hurt him. “We need to let voters know that the first round does count. There is a sense that only the runoff counts, and we need to change this,” he says.

Humala, who is not the same firebrand as in 2006, is counting on high levels of discontent with the García administration and the economic model to give him a late-in-the-campaign boost. García’s public support is a paltry 27%, despite an economy growing close to double digits, and in an early March survey by Datum, more than 75% of voters said he had done a worse job than Toledo during his term.

Perhaps equally telling, García’s APRA party was unable to field a candidate from among its ranks and turned to his former finance minister, Mercedes Aráoz, to head the ticket. She lasted only a few weeks, pulling out in January with less than 5% in the polls.

Even more encouraging for the Humala camp is the apparent rejection of the economic policies that have been in place since the 1990s. In the Datum poll, 51% of people polled said they want the current economic model changed, while 37% want some changes, 5% want no changes and 7% did not respond.

Humala is the only candidate proposing a change in the model, advocating a stronger role for the state in the economy. Analysts give him a fighting chance to make the runoff, but all the polls show him losing in the second round to all the other top candidates.

Toledo remains the only president in Peru’s modern history who can claim that GDP expanded every month he was in office

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