Far-Left primary school teacher vowing to nationalise all mines pitted against heir to homicidal family dynasty in election no-one wants

Fanny Cornejo is one of Peru’s more fortunate voters. Unlike most of her compatriots, she has been able to decide which of the two politically extreme and deeply unpopular presidential candidates who emerged from Sunday’s general election, she will back in the June 6 runoff. 

“Castillo will not have a majority in Congress. He will have his hands tied and won’t be able to implement his crazy ideas,” says the biologist, 37, from Lima, explaining why she will vote for Pedro Castillo, the leftist dark horse who, to widespread surprise, beat 17 other presidential wannabes in the first round.  

After his victory, Mr Castillo, a teachers union leader who works at a state primary school in a remote corner of the Andean region of Cajamarca, said he would seek to build bridges with his political opponents. But he then added: “This is a battle between the rich and the poor, the struggle between the ... master and the slave.” 

Mr Castillo, who had been polling at 4% just two weeks before the election, believes Venezuela is a democracy, wants to nationalize Peru’s vast mining sector and abolish the constitutional court, and opposes school gender awareness classes in a society with extreme levels of domestic violence and femicides. 

For many in Peru, traumatised by the hyperinflation and Maoist terrorists of the Shining Path of the 1980s and 1990s, the very term “left” remains anathema. Yet their country is once again in a deadly crisis after five years of political turmoil that have severely damaged trust in Peru’s fragile democracy and handicapped the government’s ability to respond to the pandemic. 

With the Brazilian strain of the coronavirus now running rampant across the country – there are currently 2,000 patients on the national ICU waiting list – and the economy shrinking 11% last year, Sunday’s vote took place amid a climate of both contempt for establishment politicians and deep desperation. 

The fact that Mr Castillo, 51, has any chance of winning in June is because his opponent in the runoff is the even more unpalatable Keiko Fujimori, daughter of 1990s strongman president Alberto Fujimori, who is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence for grand scale corruption and directing death squads.  

She promises to preserve Peru’s free market and crack down on crime. But Ms Fujimori, 45, has also vowed to pardon her father and faces a money-laundering trial of her own, which could be blocked by her presidential immunity should she win. Prosecutors are calling for a 31-year sentence for Ms Fujimori, whose only known job was a member of congress from 2006 to 2011, when she missed a total of 500 days of legislative sessions. 

Her Popular Force party, which dominated congress from 2016 to 2019, has been repeatedly accused of attacking Peruvian democracy, including pushing legislation to curb the free press and attempting to pack the courts to shut down criminal investigations into prominent Fujimoristas. 

Yet whoever wins the hard left-versus-hard right showdown may not see out their five-year term. Both candidates face a crisis of legitimacy after Mr Castillo took 19% and Ms Fujimori 13%, record lows, in the crowded first round race. Around 70% of the electorate wants neither candidate as president. 

Meanwhile, last November’s ouster of President Martín Vizcarra has effectively rewritten the constitution to allow presidential impeachment on a congressional whim. The new legislature will lean to the right, and might support Ms Fujimori’s agenda were she to win, but will also be splintered, with 10 small parties, unpredictable and heavily populist, experts warn. 

“It’s a timebomb. Both Keiko and Castillo have more than enough controversies for either one to be impeached at any moment,” warns Anthony Medina Rivas Plata, a politics professor at the Santa María Catholic University of Arequipa.