Protest vote in Peru

The voters may not have decided anything in the first round of the Peruvian presidential elections, but one understands their meaning pretty clearly. Ollanta Humala, the former army officer and leader of the dispossessed- a third of the population lives under the poverty threshold- has received no less than 30 percent of the votes, which, together with the other results, speaks volumes about the country.

Keiko Fujimori- the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, who is now serving a 25-year prison sentence for serious human rights violations- is in a position to contest the presidency with him; and the third most popular choice although now left out of the running, is the businessman and former economy minister, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. The ex-President Alejandro Toledo and the former mayor of Lima, Luis Castañeda, have also fallen by the wayside.

Though Peru's economy has grown in recent years at a rate of more than six percent annually, the vote amounts to a sharp repudiation of the system. Humala has done his electoral homework and has been advised by collaborators of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; and though he has set aside the Chávez-like vociferation that characterized his 2006 campaign, when he was defeated by the now outgoing Alan García, in the eyes of the Peruvian right he is still a protest candidate.

Keiko Fujimori, for her part, is as conservative as anyone else, but has profited electorally from the popular memory of her father's generous social welfare policies, as well as from the defeat he inflicted on the Shining Path terrorist movement. And this, in turn, causes her to be labeled with the rather fuzzy adjective "populist."

The others, including the historic party of the Peruvian left, the APRA of Alan García- which, due to unencouraging opinion polls for García's chosen successor, did not even run a candidate- have all in varying degrees received a repudiating non satisfecit from the electorate, which seemed to say: economic growth is all very well, but shared out more decently, please.

All this is due to an extreme fragmentation of the vote, in which there is no room for secondary preferences. In effect, you vote for the candidate you vote for, and abhor the one you don't. This is why the swords still remain relatively outside the scabbards.

In a normal view of things, the seven-or-eight point advantage that Humala has over Fujimori, ought to be enough to give him a clear victory. But it is worth remembering that in the previous presidential election, the leftist candidate had won in the first round, followed by a general call to action to stop him in his tracks, to the benefit of Alan García. Will this process be repeated? Between Fujimori and Humala there exists a fairly wide band of voters that they might be said to have in common, votes which might go either way: disgruntled people of no particular ideology. And this makes forecasting an even more difficult task.