Peru’s Fujimori pushes again to annul votes as Castillo nears runoff win

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Peru’s presidential candidate Pedro Castillo addresses supporters from the headquarters of the “Free Peru” party, in Lima, Peru June 10, 2021. REUTERS/Liz Tasa

Peruvian right-wing presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, who is expected to lose a runoff election against a socialist rival, on Saturday said she would lead a protest to pressure for the annulment of votes that did not favor her.

Front-runner Pedro Castillo, a member of the left-wing Free Peru party,is close to being named the Andean country’s next president as the count from the second round of voting earlier this month nears an end.

Castillo, an elementary school teacher who was raised in an impoverished village, was leading the count by 51,000 votes on Saturday morning, with around 59,000 votes remaining to be counted.

“We won, teacher Pedro Castillo (is) President,” his party tweeted late on Friday.

Fujimori on Saturday blamed the “international left” for pushing for a Castillo victory, citing how Argentina and Bolivia, countries led by left-wing leaders, have been quick to recognize the socialist candidate as Peru’s president-elect.

“Peru is a country that is strategically, geopolitically speaking, crucial in Latin America, and that is why the international left is trying this,” Fujimori said in a news conference with foreign media.

Fujimori, the daughter of jailed ex-President Alberto Fujimori, has doubled down this week on unsubstantiated allegations of fraud, seeking to disqualify tens of thousands of rural votes that largely favored Castillo.

But even if Fujimori were to succeed, the number of votes still in play make it unlikely she would succeed in flipping the result.

The tense vote count is the culmination of a bitterly divisive election in Peru, where low-income citizens supported Castillo while wealthier ones voted for Fujimori.

On Friday, Peru’s electoral jury, which oversees elections in the country, tried to push back a deadline to allow Fujimori to submit requests to disqualify up to 200,000 votes cast in Peru’s poorest regions, but said in the afternoon that it had backtracked on that plan, paving the way for a Castillo victory.

On Saturday, Fujimori said she would be leading a protest to pressure electoral authorities to reconsider all 200,000 votes, even though so far she has only been able to challenge about 38,000 of them.

“We call for the (electoral jury) to guarantee and support a clean and just electoral process,” Castillo tweeted on Friday night. “The Peruvian people deserve it.”

Fujimori, meanwhile, responded on Twitter that “the field was not level.” She has so far declined to concede.

Fujimori first brought up allegations of fraud on Monday, and signaled on Wednesday that she intended to seek the annulment of some 200,000 votes in rural areas of the country that support Castillo.

One of the her main arguments is that she had won no votes among groups in those regions that pool up to 300 people, which she said was a sign of electoral fraud.

Castillo has spooked markets, largely because his party describes itself as Marxist-Leninist.

He has recently sought to appease markets with a moderate-left platform, but it remains unclear if his administration will ultimately keep that tone or revert to the party’s roots as a far-left organization.

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