OPINION | Elections in Peru: in Castillo's contest against Keiko, the antifujimoristas will be divided into three | CNN

Editor's Note:

Carlos Alberto Montaner is a writer, journalist, and CNN contributor.

His columns are published in dozens of newspapers in Spain, the United States and Latin America.

Montaner is also vice president of the Liberal International.

The opinions expressed here are solely his.

(CNN Spanish) -

18 candidates were nominated.

That happened in Peru on April 11.

Two remained and no one got 50% of the vote.

With 100% of the votes counted, the teacher Pedro Castillo, a left-wing trade unionist, and the former first lady and former right-wing congressman Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori (originally elected with the support of Peruvians) survived electorally.

Castillo obtained, roughly, 19% of the votes, essentially in the Andean region of the country.

Fujimori, 13% in all of Peru.

As I see it, that indicates that on June 6, when they meet in the second round, Fujimori must triumph and assume the presidency of the country, at the end of July.

Lima and Arequipa represent almost 40% of the electorate, in a country where voting is compulsory for citizens between 18 and 70 years old.

Beyond ideological differences, Pedro Castillo is a regional and rural phenomenon, while Keiko Fujimori's implantation is national and urban. The daughter of the former president has the prior support of the third of the country who, despite all the demerits, is convinced that Alberto Fujimori was a good leader who freed them from the Shining Path terrorism and who laid the foundations for the economic development that later followed. all the rulers, even the "second" Alan García, so different from the first.

The Fujimori, who are many, have someone to vote for in Peru.

But the problem is with the anti-Fujimoristas, who are also numerous, and who in the past gave the victory to Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala and Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the three accused of corruption, something that they vehemently deny.

I suspect that this vast sector of Peruvian voters will be divided into three: a majority that will cover their nose and vote for Keiko because it will seem like the least bad option, a pro-communist minority that will vote for Castillo, and an undetermined number that will vote blank, which, finally, will be useful to Castillo.

Castillo and Fujimori: opposing poles for the presidency 4:56

Pedro Castillo proposes the classic path of "Socialism of the XXI century": re-found Peru after drafting a new Constitution;

give a preponderance to the State that today it does not have;

and nationalizing energy sources, telecommunications, and other key sectors of the economy.

That is why Evo Morales is happy in Bolivia and said that Castillo raises the same things as the Movement for Socialism, the MAS, in his country.

advertising

Only that Peru is not Bolivia (it has a totally different ethnic and cultural composition) and it already knew left-wing populism in the past. In 1968, Peruvian General Juan Velasco Alvarado carried out a military coup, confiscated and intervened many of the large companies, and carried out a sharp agrarian reform, plunging his country into chaos, shortages and inflation. It was a dress rehearsal of what Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro would do years later in Venezuela. In 1975, another general, Francisco Morales-Bermúdez, staged a coup against the Velasco Alvarado government. After that democracy and a market economy returned to the country, and Peru slowly grew again. Even so,Morales-Bermúdez was sentenced in Italy to life imprisonment in 2017 for the disappearance and death of some 20 Italian-Latin American citizens in the development of the Condor Plan.

Peru approves the extradition of Alejandro Toledo to the US 1:43

And let's not forget that in recent years, before the pandemic, Peru made an enviable leap in the economic field.

Keiko Fujimori will come to power with the experience of having seen her father behind bars for not having been a true democrat, for having committed crimes against human rights, and of having authoritarian tendencies and gestures herself.

She has an additional problem: the Peruvian Prosecutor's Office is investigating her on suspicion of having used money from Odebrecht bribes to finance her campaigns.

She firmly denies the allegations.

Hopefully Fujimori has learned his lesson.

Public officials can only do what the law tells them to do.

Private entrepreneurs, on the other hand, have at their disposal everything that the law does not expressly prohibit them.

That difference is very important.

Keiko Fujimori gets out of jail 2:36

Elections Keiko Fujimori