For those not aware, Peru had an extremely consequential election earlier this month. Pedro Castillo, an indigenous, left-wing rural teacher and rondero whose only political experience was leading a 2017 nationwide teacher strike, was pitted against the far-right Keiko Fujimori, the heiress to the country’s most important political dynasty established by her dictator father. The economic, social and political elite, propped up by the media, overwhelmingly sided with the latter. But in what can only be described as a modern day David and Goliath battle, Castillo won, earning 8,835,579 votes and 50.125% of valid voteshare to Fujimori’s 8,791,521 votes and 49.875% . The significance of this in a country which in 200 years of independence has never elected a socialist, has only elected an indigenous leader once and non-Lima-born leaders twice simply cannot be overstated. With this victory comes a massive setback for the Latin American right, as Peru has always stood as one of the great “success stories” and regional bastions of neoliberalism, just like Chile (which is also poised to turn sharply leftward this year).
Of course, this was only the second round of the election - there was a first round back in April, which saw nearly twenty candidates run. Being as strict in my definitions as possible, parties of the centre-right, conservatives and the far right won a combined 67.23% of the vote in the first round of Peru’s presidential election. Parties of the left (including the bizarre NazBol-like “ethnocacerist” tendency) won just 32.76% of the vote. Castillo and Fujimori only made it into the runoffs because of an extremely splintered field. Had Castillo gone up against any other less polarising candidate of the right, he would have been crushed. Likewise, if Fujimori had been up against any other candidate, she would have been blown out of the water. This was the only possible matchup where either candidate truly had a chance. This was Fujimori’s 3rd unsuccessful attempt at winning Peru’s presidency, and looking at how her support has shifted since 2016 (in which she ran against the centrist candidate Pedro Pablo Kuczynski) tells us a lot about the dynamics that shaped the outcome of this election.
Here, we can see how the realignment played out. A significant swathe of interior Peru was won by Fujimori in 2016 but swung decisively to Castillo in 2021, and the Departments that flipped were the following:
Amazonas (52-48 Fujimori, now 67-33 Castillo)
San Martin (56-44 Fujimori, now 56-44 Castillo)
Ancash (51-49 Fujimori, now 58-41 Castillo)
Huanuco (51-49 Fujimori, now 68-32 Castillo)
Junin (51-49 Fujimori, now 58-41 Castillo)
Ayacucho (52-48 Fujimori, now 83-17 Castillo)
Madre de Dios (64-36 Fujimori, now 71-29 Castillo)
Only two Departments swung in the other direction, Loreto (54-46 Kuczynski, now 52-48 Fujimori) and Lima province (51-49 Kuczynski, now 66-34 Fujimori). Also not shown above is the foreign vote, which PPK narrowly won in 2016 with 51% but in which Fujimori won a 67% landslide in 2021.
What this tells us then, is that the stark geographical polarisation which has been the primary feature of 2021’s election, was much less of a factor in 2016 and that Castillo’s presence in the race arguably turned it into one. Nevertheless, this sharp polarisation can be visualised in another form, as seen below.
Here we can see the intensity of support for the two candidates. Castillo’s most concentrated support is found in the highland south, where he wins 70-80% across most of the regions, while his less commanding victories (Cajamarca notwithstanding) are further north, along the country’s “spine”. Fujimori’s most concentrated support is found abroad, in metropolitan Lima and on the urbanised northern coast, while her victories in the interior lowland regions and rural provinces are much narrower. In order to understand how Castillo won, though, we need to look at where raw votes come from.
The biggest repository of Fujimori votes here is obviously metropolitan Lima, in which around 1/3rd of the country’s population lives. Castillo with much more diffuse support doesn’t have any such single votesink, but his raw margins are powered by three regions - Puno and Cusco in the Andean south, and his home of Cajamarca in the north. Some of the provinces which Castillo won by relatively narrower margins such as Junin and Ancash and also had massive electorates, helping pad his margins.
The election happened on Sunday the 6th of June. for most of that night until some time the next day, Fujimori was ahead in the tallies as the urban vote was being counted much faster. It was only when more rural areas began coming in that Castillo’s own numbers began inching up. At one point, he surpassed her, and she would never reclaim the lead - though many expected the expatriate vote from abroad to tilt it back in her favour. It was around late evening on the 7th, once Castillo had netted around 100K votes out of Peru alone, that it increasingly became clear that a mathematical pathway for Fujimori didn’t exist. Of course, it is now 10 days later and even though the votes are fully counted, a declaration is yet to be made - thanks to Fujimori’s desperate bid to overturn the election result with futile legal bids and appeals challenging ballots favouring Castillo.
Finally, there remains something to be said for the pervasive theme that spread across western media coverage of the Peru election, suggesting mass disenchantment, disengagement and rejection towards the “extreme” choice on offer and polling which projected high levels of vote-spoiling and abstention. In the end, the election’s 75% turnout in the second round was 4 points *higher* than it was in the first, and only 5% of cast ballots were spoilt or blank the exact same as the last election - and lower than that of the first round. For better or worse, it suggests that even though 70% of them voted for neither candidate in the first round, the people of Peru themselves felt something greater at stake and were somewhat more charged up about taking their country down a drastically divergent path than the English-speaking liberal commentariat would have liked. Perhaps it is no surprise that much of the foreign press and diplomatic corp in the country is concentrated in areas like Miraflores and San Isidro - upscale parts of Lima which voted 70% for the liberal PPK in 2016, but more than 80% for Fujimori this time.