Election of the weekend III: Peru

Sunday is also election day in Peru, where a new president will be elected, along with all 190 seats in Congress of Peru (60 senators, 130 members of the Chamber of Deputies). The president and vice president are elected as a ticket in s standard two round election. The 130 seats in the Chamber are elected via open list PR in 27 multi-member constituencies, with a 5% national threshold. 30 of the 60 senators are elected via national list PR, 4 are elected from the Lima constituency using open list PR, and the other 26 Chamber constituencies elect one senator. (The Senate is a site of significant rural overrepresentation as a result of this allotment.) Peru will also be electing their five allotted seats to the Andean Parliament on Sunday, via nationwide PR. (Peru, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Columbia each get 5 seats in this body, elected/selected on their own timetable.)

The Peruvian presidency has not been particularly stable recently. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was elected in 2016 and resigned to avoid impeachment in 2018. His VP took over and was impeached in 2020. After an interim presidency, Pedro Castillo, a far-left rural schoolteacher, political outsider was elected in 2021. In 2022, he attempted to dissolve congress and rule by decree. He was impeached with a few hours, and arrested as soon as he set foot out of the presidential palace. His VP, Dina Boluarte, took over. Her attempts to stabilize the presidency proved a bit of an uphill struggle and was widely considered to be among the most unpopular national leaders in the world, with an approval rating dipping well into single digits. Following further breakdowns in public order she was impeached in October. She was replaced by Jose Jeri, the president of Congress, whose brief presidency was faced with two crises almost immediately: first, credible accusations he had commited sexual assault, leading to massive protests in Lima, and second, a border crisis on the Chilean border. Chilean president Kast had announced a mass expulsion plan for most Venezuelan migrants in Chile, triggering a large influx of asylum seekers crossing the border from Chile into Peru. He was impeached and removed in February, replaced by the third unelected president in a row and the 9th president in 10 years, José María Balcázar. At 83, Balcazar was understood to be a caretaker to get the country through to the next election. His long political career has seen a number of controversies, leading to headlines like “Leftist who defended Child Marriage elected as Peru’s Interim President,” but seems have managed to hold down the job for a few months without making things worse, which puts him well ahead of his predecessor.

The field is massive and no one is polling above around 15%. Unsurprisingly, given the breakdown of public order in recent years, right wing candidates and parties are polling somewhat better than their left wing counterparts. The leader in presidential polling is Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former president Alberto. That someone with her kind of name recognition and fame she has (as a young adult she performed the role of “first lady” for six years after her mother denounced her father for his rank corruption and divorced him in 1994) is only polling in the low to mid teens is probably not a great sign, but she is probably the single most likely candidate to go through to the second round right now. She represents Popular Force, a socially conservative, right populist party. The other candidates with a decent shot at making it through are Carlos Gonsalo Álvarez Loayza, a comedian and screenwriter known for his impressions and parodies of various Peruvian politicians, representing the vaguely left populist “Country for All” party, Rafael López Aliaga, a former Lima mayor whose party, Popular Renewal, is described in ways that make it difficult to see much daylight between them and Popular Force, except maybe a bit less populist, a bit more neoliberal on economic affairs. The fourth candidate who is seen a threat to go through to the second round is Ricardo Belmont, another former Lima mayor from back in the 1990’s. Prediction markets seem to like him a bit more than polling. In addition to his long political career, he has owned a major Peruvian TV station. He paved the pay for his political comeback by reinventing himself as a popular youtuber. Apparently a frequent subject of his videos is his admiration for AMLO, the popular then-president of Mexico. Efforts to find people on the internet willing to attempt to characterize his politics turns up phrases like “defies the L-R spectrum” and “technocratic populist.” At 81, he seems a bit long in the tooth for a presidential candidate, but given the typical length of tenure for Peruvian presidents maybe there’s little reason to worry about that.

There are a dozen or more candidates beyond that, and I suspect polling is particularly unreliable when there’s a massive, fluid field of contenders, with the leading candidates barely breaking double digits. You can be certain we’ll be back here in early June to discuss the top two. Hopefully Mr. Balcázar can avoid impeachment for that long.

On the legislative side, a similar fragmentation exists. Fujimori’s Popular Force tends to lead, but like their leader tops out in the teens. Since Popular Renewal and Popular Force are the top two in most recent polling, a conservative or center-right coalition seems pretty likely.