Peru Election 2006

Read also: John Crabtree analiza a Ollanta Humala; Peruvians Prepare to Bite Back and Peru’s chessboard

John Crabtree: “Hay una enorme fractura social”
Por Emilio Camacho
La Republica, 25 de abril de 2006
• Estudioso del Perú e investigador asociado del Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Universidad de Oxford, dice que Humala, al igual que Fujimori, podría legitimarse atacando a los partidos políticos
• Advierte que cultura política está enfocada a Lima y no a provincias.
–¿Si los partidos políticos están tan desacreditados, por qué la población ha votado mayoritariamente por ellos y no por la candidatura antipartidos?
–Todas las encuestas dicen que en el país el rechazo a la clase política es muy profundo, sin embargo las elecciones muestran que casi el 50% de los electores ha preferido votar por un partido. Como usted dice, el éxito de la candidatura de Humala está en función del rechazo a la clase política, pero no se puede olvidar que Lourdes Flores y Alan García han obtenido casi la misma votación que en el 2001.
–¿Con este resultado se puede decir que las cosas han mejorado para los partidos?
–Lo que hay que entender es que la población peruana está muy fragmentada. El respaldo para la candidatura antipartidos es más fuerte entre los sectores más pobres, ya sea en Lima y provincias. El sentimiento antilimeño también es característico de la votación a favor de Humala.
–¿No es contradictorio que la candidatura que obtiene el mayor respaldo de provincias naciera en Lima? ¿Por qué esta candidatura no nació en provincias?
–Es que hay un sistema político muy “Limacéntrico”, además que Lima representa el 30% de los votantes. La cultura política siempre ha estado enfocada a lo limeño. Hasta los políticos de provincias cambian cuando llegan a Lima y se alejan de sus bases. Ese es el verdadero problema. Los partidos políticos son vehículos electorales más que nexos de representación entre sociedad y Estado.
–¿Ese es el único problema? ¿No hay también mucho de caudillismo, de proyectos políticos personales, detrás de las organizaciones políticas?
–Este es un aspecto notable en el pasado reciente de los partidos y se ve con más énfasis durante la década del 90 con Fujimori. Aquí hay un punto de quiebre y lo que empieza a verse a partir de esta fecha son pequeños grupúsculos, muy personalistas.
–¿Por qué las clases populares sienten que los partidos no pueden representar sus intereses?
–Yo estuve hace un año en el sur, y me quedó muy claro que para los pobladores de esta región los partidos políticos eran irrelevantes a la hora de transmitir sus demandas. Es un factor social
–¿Qué hacer para revertir esta situación?
–Trabajo de base. El problema es que la lógica del sistema político es congregarse alrededor del poder y sobre todo en Lima. Yo creo que hay que estar preparado para representar, pero también para gobernar. El problema principal, sin embargo, es la enorme fractura social que hay en el país, que no permite estar preparado para ambas cosas. Es por ello que no se puede echar la culpa de todo a los partidos.
Sopa de outsiders
–¿Qué responsabilidad tiene el presidente Toledo en el actual descrédito de los partidos?
–Realmente se esperaba mucho. Hubo un momento entre el 2002 y el 2003, cuando se da la nueva Ley de Partidos, en el que se pensó que se podía cambiar el comportamiento de los partidos a través de las reformas legales. Esto, a mi juicio, fue una visión muy positiva porque es muy difícil cambiar la clase política. No se ha logrado revertir la sensación de que los partidos son organizaciones meramente electorales y creo que el gobierno de Toledo ha sido muy decepcionante en ese sentido.
–¿Cree que perdió la oportunidad de mejorar la imagen del sistema de partidos?
–No lo hizo. Lo que ha pasado con su partido es muy ilustrativo, porque prácticamente ha sido borrado del mapa.
–Si Ollanta Humala gana las elecciones, deberá gobernar con las reglas de juego de los demás partidos. ¿No cree que actúa con irresponsabilidad cuando los ataca y descalifica?
–Yo creo que se encuentra ante una situación muy parecida a la de Fujimori. Siempre hay la tentación de legitimarse castigando a quienes la gente identifica como enemigos, en este caso los partidos políticos. Al mismo tiempo, Humala va a necesitar cierto apoyo de los partidos, pero su actitud genera cierta preocupación.
“Electores de Lourdes ven a Alan como el mal menor”
–Usted ha escrito un libro sobre el primer gobierno de Alan García. ¿Qué piensa de la posibilidad de que vuelva al poder?
–La mejor manera de atacar a Alan García es concentrarse en los efectos nefastos de su primer gobierno. Pero él ha dicho que ya no es el mismo Alan García, que se ha reconciliado con el libre mercado y que no intentaría de nuevo estatizar la banca. A esto hay que sumarle este escenario de segunda vuelta en el que los electores de Lourdes Flores ven a Alan García como el mal menor.
–¿Cree entonces que quienes apostaron por Lourdes Flores le darán sus votos a Alan García?
–Yo creo que el resultado de la elección en segunda vuelta va a ser muy estrecho. Hay un sector de fujimoristas que podrían simpatizar con la candidatura de Ollanta Humala. Habrá que ver, además, cuál será la táctica de Alan García que debe moverse hacia la derecha, pero sin descuidar el mensaje que tiene para los pobres.
–¿En qué falló Lourdes Flores? ¿Por qué no rindió la campaña que empezó hace dos años, que estaba dirigida a las clases populares?
–Yo creo que Lourdes Flores es representante de una clase política del pasado que ya ha fallado. Ese es su principal problema.
Peru’s chessboard
John Crabtree
Open Democracy, April 18, 2006
The identity of Ollanta Humala’s challenger in the second round of Peru’s presidential election may have a decisive bearing on the result, says John Crabtree.
The first round of Peru’s presidential poll on 9 April 2006 is already becoming a distant memory, yet with just over 90% of the votes counted the country’s citizens are still not sure who will challenge the frontrunner Ollanta Humala in the run-off now likely to take place in early June.
Humala’s lead is one of the few certainties of the campaign so far. His vote of just under 31% puts him substantially ahead of his nearest rivals, Alan García (24.3%) and Lourdes Flores (23.6%). Under Peru’s electoral laws, only the candidates in first and second place go through into the second round. This makes the political character of the two leading players, and the way the votes of the losing candidates are transferred, important in determining the final result. In this particular election, the very narrowness of the gap between García and Flores – a feature of the last weeks of the campaign and throughout the painfully slow count – is becoming a key factor in the outcome.
The interminability of the counting procedure is explained by the slim margin separating García and Flores, as well as the number of tally-sheets (some 1,700, accounting for around 8% of the vote, more than 1.5 million in total) being examined by the electoral court for supposed irregularities. The count itself has had many twists and turns: in its early part, Flores looked like making it into second place; then she was overtaken by García, then Flores began to narrow the gap in the weekend of 15-16 April. Amidst this uncertainty, Peru’s electoral authorities say they hope to have a final result by 21 April.
Humala’s Appeal
The ex-military officer of indigenous origin Ollanta Humala projected himself in the campaign as a nationalist and leftist in an effort to appeal to those (especially among the poor) who resent the country’s political class. Since one out of every two voters in Peru is considered to live in poverty (in many cases extreme poverty), the number of discontented runs into millions. Humala’s support was indeed strongest in Peru’s most socially-deprived departments, in the central and southern Andes. He won more than half the votes cast in the regions of Ayacucho, Apurímac and Huancavelica – also those where the Maoist guerrilla movement Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) held sway in the 1980s and early 1990s. He also earned the most votes in poor departments such as Puno and Cuzco, as well as in those parts of the capital Lima where incomers from the provinces have built vast, sprawling shanty-towns.
The millions of poor who gave Humala their vote did so not so much because of his personality or the strength of his programme, but because he stood as an “anti-system” candidate. A recent United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) survey provided an illuminating measure of the level of distrust in politicians, parties and democratic institutions in the country. Most Peruvians, it seems, place the blame for their predicament squarely on the shoulders of the political class. True, this has long been a feature of Peruvian politics, but the degree of alienation has become especially marked during the sleaze-ridden government of outgoing president, Alejandro Toledo. For most of his five years in office, Toledo’s popularity rating has seldom risen even to double digits.
Flores’s hope
At this stage, Humala must be considered the favourite to be Peru’s next president. But who will wrestle him for the position?
It is still possible – though on balance improbable – that the centre-right, business-friendly politician Lourdes Flores will join Humala on the ballot-paper for the second round. She won a handsome majority among the large numbers of émigré Peruvian voters, whose ballots are being added gradually to the official toll. She also appeared to have a fairly strong advantage in Lima, where just under half of the disputed tally-sheets come from. As the official count creeps towards a definitive result, the Flores camp has certainly not given up hope.
Lourdes Flores belongs to the rightwing Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC), whose support has risen considerably on the wave of her own campaigning. In general, she supports the neo-liberal and business-friendly policies of the “Washington consensus”; but as in the 2001 presidential election, she has placed much more emphasis than an earlier generation of conservatives on the need for effective social policies to tackle poverty and to reduce Peru’s yawning social and ethnic inequalities.
If Flores were to win through to the second round, the battle with Humala would be one of ideological polarisation between left and right. According to opinion polls taken before the first round, Flores would win such a contest. This now seems improbable. The only part of Peru where her broad Unidad Nacional (UN) alliance finished on top was in Lima, where approximately 30% of the electorate reside. In most departments outside the capital, the alliance was in third or even fourth place. Flores, if she did manage to squeeze into the run-off, would attract the decided support of the business class and most of the media; but these alone would not give her the numerical boost she would need to win the day.
García’s chance
The outcome of an Ollanta Humala-Alan García second-round contest would probably be a good deal closer than if Lourdes Flores was the main challenger. García and Humala’s ideological competition is more directly for the leftwing vote. The ex-president (1985-90) García now distances himself from the positions he took in that era of expansion and runaway inflation, but he is still clearly to the left of a figure like Lourdes Flores. Moreover, he has two important political assets: he retains charismatic qualities, and has the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (Apra) party to back him up. Apra is Peru’s oldest mass party, and – in a political culture where party organisation plays a key role in getting out the vote – it possesses a level of grassroots mobilisation unmatched by its rivals.
Apra has, nonetheless, a long way to climb to turn Alan García’s 24% support into a majority of votes. The party did score quite strongly in the coastal departments of the north, but it will need to attract large numbers of previously uncommitted voters to win the election. Apra scored poorly both in Lima and in southern areas of the country. If this is a worry for the party, its hope is that the media and the business elite may switch to supporting Apra as “the lesser of two evils” in comparison with Humala. Nor would such an advantage be enough; Apra would still need to show that it can make inroads into Humala’s core support – and it will only do so by persuading poor Peruvian voters that the ex-officer’s more radical option will make their lives even more problematic and uncertain.
The first round of the Peruvian election, then, offers little guidance as to its eventual outcome. If, as is likely, Flores is pushed into third place, few can bet with confidence on whether García or Humala will prevail in June. Either result would almost certainly represent a shift to the left after the Toledo administration. The result will be a rollercoaster ride both in domestic and foreign policy. Peru’s new leadership might seek to revoke the free-trade agreement with the United States agreed in December 2005, and in any case pursue a less conciliatory policy towards Washington. Neither an assertive Garcia nor an outspoken Humala would be to the taste of the current US administration; but the scale of Peru’s social problems will make it hard enough for either to satisfy Peru’s own citizens.