Keiko Fujimori: Peru’s would-be president | tagesschau.de

The politician Fujimori does not want to accept her defeat in the presidential election in Peru. She prefers to whisper about fraud and call Sieger Castillo a communist. The country is further destabilized.

“No to cheating” and “Respect my choice!” can be read on the posters that followers of Keiko Fujimori brought with them to a demonstration: They do not believe that everything was right during the count. And the candidate, who, according to the official figures, narrowly lost a runoff election for the third time in a row, is fueling the mood by suggesting fraud: “Some irregularities have occurred and we believe it is important to prove them”, she whispered.

Your party called on citizens to find out if there were any other inconsistencies. And this even though international election observers see no evidence of manipulation or other irregularities in the election. But like the former US President Donald Trump in the state of Georgia, Fujimori is demanding that the votes from certain constituencies not count.

Fujimori wants partial cancellation of the results

Her party “Fuerza Popular” has applied to the National Electoral Chamber to cancel the results from 802 electoral districts – this corresponds to around 200,000 votes, which, given the razor-thin lead of their opponent, would be enough to get Pedro Castillo to replace Fujimori as president.

She finds it suspicious that she was initially ahead in predictions and at the beginning of the counting and that the tendency only tilted at the very end: Only when almost all the votes had been counted her opponent Castillo was ahead. However, this can also be explained by the fact that results from remote rural areas were last received in Lima – and there, in the countryside, the Left Castillo has the greatest approval.

Daughter of the autocrat Fujimori

The count has long since become a hangover. Politically torn Peru, which has not trusted its politicians for a long time, has been waiting since June 6 to find out who will rule the country in the future.

Not only is Castillo’s narrow election victory astonishing, but also that Fujimori made it to the runoff election again – and again, as most recently in 2016, only just failed with around 49.9 percent of the vote. That would be hard to imagine in other countries.

On the one hand, she is the daughter of the autocrat Alberto Fujimori, who temporarily ruled Peru as a dictator in the 1990s. On the other hand, it is likely to be deep in the Odebrecht corruption swamp, the great bribe money scandal in Latin America. Her father ruled democratically at first, then disempowered parliament and cracked down on the Maoist guerrilla organization “Shining Path” with extreme brutality. Fujimori sent death squads into the country killing thousands of civilians and was convicted of human rights abuses. He also ensured that tens of thousands of indigenous women were sterilized against their will.

Election campaign in custody

His daughter Keiko was already close to power at that time. She took on the role of first lady at her father’s side after her parents divorced. She has always denied involvement in the Odebrecht bribery scandal: she never accepted any money from Odebrecht or his company, was completely innocent and had a clear conscience, the 46-year-old repeated in a hearing just a few days ago.

After the election, she almost ended up in prison again: the country’s top corruption investigator tried in vain to obtain a new arrest warrant. The allegations against her are so specific that she has been in custody for 16 months and even during the election campaign was only allowed to leave the capital with a special permit from the investigative authorities.

Against this background, it seems rather strange that she of all people promised during the election campaign to take a whole series of new measures against corruption. For years she had tried to score points with law and order promises. After her narrow defeat in 2016, she used her parliamentary majority to put as many obstacles as possible in the way of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. That was a mistake, as she now admits – because it shares responsibility for the political instability that Peru has experienced with four presidents in five years in recent years.

Fear of communism purposefully stoked

This time Fujimori took a more gentle stance in the election campaign, tried to reach voters in the middle, promised three million jobs, social programs and even more redistribution: “I propose a people’s budget. 40 percent of the taxes are distributed directly to the population, dear friends!”

But their most important argument is and remains that one must prevent a left-wing regime like the one in Venezuela – what is meant, of course, is a government of their opponent Castillo. “Do you want communism? Do you want a Peru modeled on Maduro and Chavez? A country where violence prevails and free expression is persecuted?” She threatened – and she likes to move Castillo close to the terrorists that visited Peru in the 1990s.

The fact that she herself is not ready to accept her renewed defeat should bring Peru more troubled years.