Castillo will be the next president of Peru

The left-wing candidate Pedro Castillo defeated the right-wing candidate with 50.13% of the votes.  Keiko Fujimori finally obtained 49.87% after 100% of the votes were counted in Peru's second presidential election. The winner was announced after the National Office of Electoral Procedures (ONPE) demanded the cancellation of some 200,000 votes that were selected as "special allegations of fraud at the table" by Fujimori's party, despite the completion of the vote count.

After all the votes were counted, Castillo received 8,835,579 votes, 44,058 more than Fujimori, who got 8,791,521. More than 25 million Peruvians were called to vote on 6 June, of whom 18.8 million (74.5%) voted at home and abroad. According to the ONPE report, in addition to the 17.6 million valid votes, there are more than one million invalid votes, representing 5.8% of the total votes, and 121,477 blank votes, representing 0.64%. Of the total of 86,488 polling stations processed by the ONPE, 221 polling stations were cancelled by resolution and 6 polling stations corresponded to pending polling stations that were not installed correctly. 

However, the National Electoral Commission (JNE), the supreme electoral body, is currently reviewing actions and issues through its regional offices, many of which have been rejected because certain challenges have been issued outside of the legal requirements by Fujimori's advisors. Although issued by the Electoral Commission, other representatives allied with Fujimori, such as Congressman Jorge Montoya, are omitting the possibility of demanding the nullity of the elections.

The Peruvian Constitution authorises the annulment of an election in all cases, except in the cases foreseen in article 184, "in the case that the number of blank or empty votes, added together, exceeds two thirds of the number of valid votes". In this context, Castillo announced on Tuesday that he had "always defended the framework of democracy, while waiting for the electoral authorities to confirm the results".

"What we have been doing on our part has been not only to defend (the vote) in all scenarios, but also to tell the country that on our part there is no type of aggression, neither administrative, nor moral, nor political, nor electoral," the candidate said in statements to the foreign press in Lima.

During the day, Fujimori had a 2 to 3 point lead over Castillo, but everything changed when the rural vote began to be counted. With 42% of the votes counted, Fujimori had 52.9% of the votes, while Castillo had 47.09% of the votes cast. At that moment, it seemed that the advantage was irreversible, but after a few hours, when 77% of the votes had been counted, the advantage began to shrink to only 2.5 points. With 95 per cent of the votes counted for the first time, Castillo was leading by 0.2 per cent, which at the time represented almost 40,000 votes.

Latin America Coordinator: José Antonio Sierra