ELECTIONS-PERU: Humala Wins, But Uncertainty Carries the Day

By Ángel Páez Reprint | | Print |

Ángel Páez

LIMA, Apr 10 2006 (IPS) - Nationalist candidate Ollanta Humala won Peru’s presidential elections Sunday, but came nowhere near the 50 percent of the vote needed to avoid a runoff, in which he will compete with either former president Alan García or centre-right candidate Lourdes Flores.

With 75 percent of the ballots tallied, the election authorities reported that Humala had taken 29.41 percent, followed by García (24.96 percent), and Flores (24.79 percent).

Because of the close results, none of the three candidates led celebration rallies. They merely thanked voters and said they would await the official outcome in order to plan their next steps.

“We receive these results with great humility,” said Humala.

It is not yet clear whether Flores or García (who served as president from 1985 to 1990) will run against Humala in the second round, to be held in late May or early June.

Flores had led the opinion polls for months until Humala surprisingly shot ahead. But with less than two weeks to go to the elections, García began to climb in the polls, reaching a statistical tie for second place with Flores.

The head of the national election office, Magdalena Chu, said the final results will be announced in three weeks.

Analysts say one factor that could work in García’s favour in the vote tally process is the fact that his APRA party has a veritable army of militant supporters around the country, which guarantees that the race will be fought vote by vote to avoid annulled ballots.

The preliminary results of the vote for the 120 seats in Congress also reflected how highly divided voters are. None of the parties won a majority of seats, which means they will be forced to strike up alliances to push through their bills.

Humala’s Unión por el Perú garnered 20.1 percent of the votes tallied so far, the social democratic APRA (Partido Aprista Peruano) took 20 percent, and the National Unity coalition made up of the Christian People’s Party and National Solidarity, which fielded Flores as its presidential candidate, won 15.7 percent.

García has already stated that he will not reach an agreement with Humala. But analysts have not ruled out the possibility of an understanding between García and Flores. In 2004, APRA backed Ántero Flórez, the head of National Unity, when he was chosen as speaker of Congress.

The big surprise Sunday was the backing obtained by an alliance of parties loyal to former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), the Alliance for the Future. Fujimori, who was ousted in 2000 after he resigned by fax from Japan, is now in prison in Chile awaiting the results of an extradition trial. He is wanted in Peru on a number of human rights and corruption charges.

The Alliance for the Future could take a total of 15 seats in the legislature, compared to the four it won in the last elections, in 2000.

Among the new Alliance legislators are Fujimori’s daughter Keiko Sofía Fujimori, who served as first lady when Fujimori divorced his wife, and his son Santiago, who worked as an adviser to his father behind the scenes.

But Fujimori’s followers are not only pleased with the results of the legislative elections. The Alliance’s presidential candidate, former lawmaker Martha Chávez, came in fourth among the 21 candidates, with 6.7 percent of the vote, ahead of former caretaker president Valentín Paniagua, who took six percent.

Paniagua, who was designated interim president after Fujimori was removed by Congress, enjoyed 80 percent approval ratings at the time he left office in July 2001.

Chávez backed Fujimori’s unconstitutional third election, justified the crimes committed by a paramilitary group working for the intelligence service, and denied the human rights violations committed during the counterinsurgency war of the 1980s and 1990s..

Another reflection of the deep divisions among Peruvian voters took place at Ricardo Palma University, where Humala was registered to vote on Sunday.

After casting his ballot, the anti-establishment candidate and his wife, Nadine Heredia, were blocked from leaving the polling centre by large crowds shouting “murderer” and “Humala and Montesinos are the same scum,” among other insults. The university is located in a middle-class neighbourhood where polls showed much higher support for Flores.

Vladimiro Montesinos was Fujimori’s intelligence chief, and orchestrated a vast network of corruption. And Humala, a retired lieutenant colonel, has been accused of involvement in human rights abuses, including torture and forced disappearances, while commanding the Madre Mía military base in a jungle region in the early 1990s.

More than an hour and a half later, with the help of roughly 100 police officers, Humala and his wife were finally able to leave the university, although they exited under a hail of insults and objects thrown at them by the crowd.

Incumbent President Alejandro Toledo and Humala’s rivals condemned the attack, with the exception of García, who remarked, “he who sows wind, harvests storms.”

García was referring to Humala’s marked tendency in his speeches to divide the country between the rich white or mixed-race Peruvians on one side and the poor indigenous people on the other.

Election day disturbances were also reported in the Alto Huallaga region in the Amazon jungle, where coca leaves are grown for drug trafficking purposes. The Maoist rebel group Sendero Luminoso planted red hammer-and-sickle flags in a number of villages in the area and threatened to kill anyone who went to the polling stations to vote.

The local election authorities exempted the residents of Alto Huallaga from the usual practice of marking the middle finger of their right hands with ink so that the rebels would not be able to identify them as voters.

Analysts, meanwhile, also highlighted the resounding defeat of the left and of Toledo’s supporters, who now face the threat of losing the right to run in future elections. Under the new election law, political parties that do not manage to capture at least four percent of the vote cannot remain registered with the national electoral authority.

Presidential candidate Humberto Lay, an evangelical pastor and former member of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the “dirty war” against insurgents and suspected guerrillas, managed a better showing than both the leftist and ruling party contenders by taking 4.34 percent of the vote.

The governing Peru Posible party is hanging by a thread, waiting for the final results to determine if it managed to reach the fatal four-percent mark, although the party it was allied with until last year, the Frente Independiente Moralizador, has already officially been cut from the race.

On the left end of the political spectrum, the Concertación Descentralista, which obtained barely over one percent of the vote, still fared significantly better than Javier Diez Canseco of the Socialist Party and Alberto Moreno of the Leftist Broad Front. All three combined accounted for less than two percent of the ballots cast Sunday.

The general consensus is that most left-leaning voters threw their support behind Humala, whose party includes a large number of former leaders of the United Left, a political force to be reckoned with in the 1970s and 1980s that managed to win the mayor’s office in Lima and a considerable number of seats in Congress.

Ulises Humala, brother of the winning candidate and a presidential candidate himself for the Avanza País party, was wiped off the electoral map after failing to attain the crucial four percent. Antauro Humala, another of Ollanta’s brothers and the leader of a Jan. 1, 2005 military uprising, was also an Avanza País candidate for a seat in Congress.

But regardless of the final results of this first round, the real fight is just beginning. Peruvians will now have to decide whether to vote for the radical change proposed by Humala, the continuation of the current economic policies with a few reforms promoted by Flores, or an entirely new policy encompassing the lessons learned during his first administration promised by García.