PREVIEW: Peruvians to choose president in tight election

Apr 9, 2011, 8:52 GMT

Lima - Some 20 million Peruvians are to head to the polls Sunday for a tight presidential election, in which four candidates are regarded as having good chances of making it to the June 5 runoff.

The last opinion polls released Monday showed that none of the 10 candidates were expected to reach the threshold of half the vote needed to avoid a runoff.

Left-wing populist Ollanta Humala, 48, was forecast to get 28 per cent of the votes, to the 21 per cent of right-wing Keiko Fujimori, 35, who is the daughter of former Peruvian president-turned-dictator Alberto Fujimori, polling firm Ipsos Apoyo said.

Liberal Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and centrist Alejandro Toledo, who rose from poverty to serve as president from 2001-06, were tied with support of 18 per cent in the opinion poll.

Polling stations are to open at 8 am (1300 GMT) and close eight hours later. Electoral authorities have said the first results would be available around 8 pm (0100 GMT Monday).

Some in Peru fear a runoff that pits two populists on opposite ends of the political spectrum, such as Humala and Fujimori.

'I do not think my compatriots will be so foolish as to put us before the dilemma of choosing between AIDS and terminal cancer, which is what Humala and Keiko Fujimori would be,' author Mario Vargas Llosa told Peruvian television in 2009.

This week, the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Literature and former Peruvian presidential candidate, reiterated that such a runoff would be 'a catastrophe for Peru.' He endorsed Toledo.

The ruling-party of outgoing President Alan Garcia fielded no candidate to succeed him, and only partially endorsed Kuczynski.

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