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Andean Group - May 2011 (ISSN 1741-4466)

Politics: Why the election is so difficult to call

The opinion polls show, and have shown almost since the results were in after the first round on 10 April, that the second, decisive, round of the presidential elections on 5 June is too close to call. There are several reasons for this. The first is a paradox: although opinion polls put Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of the jailed former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), only a whisker ahead of Ollanta Humala, the losing left-wing candidate in 2006, the Peruvian electorate is very volatile. The clearest evidence of this volatility was Susana Villarán's surprise win in the election for mayor of Lima in October last year [RA-10-10]. And in the first round, the opinion polls had four candidates leading at different points. The second reason is that both presidential candidates appear to be populists, rather than ideologues. This means that despite the Right's claims that Humala represents a threat to the country's apparent economic stability, there are no major policy differences between the candidates. The third reason is that, with only three weeks to go before polling day, both candidates are targeting the urban lower middle class, the biggest part of the electorate, and so the policy differences between them are blurring even further.

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