With 35 candidates in the running for the presidential election on Sunday, April 12, Peruvian voters are confused. The expected scattering of votes has left local press editorialists just as puzzled in identifying serious candidacies with a chance of advancing to the second round, scheduled for June 7.
Seven candidates are polling between 5 to 10 percent of the vote intentions, each with almost equal chances of qualifying for the second round, as noted by the left-center Peruvian newspaper La República. And while polls are prohibited the week before the vote, “voters who will make the sacrifice of a strategic vote do not have all the necessary tools to choose the lesser evil.”
An humorist who defines himself as an “anarcho-syndicalist,” Carlos Alvarez, recently made a surprising breakthrough in the polls to rise to the second place in the vote intentions. With 9%, he trails behind Keiko Fujimori (13.7%), daughter of the former autocratic president Alberto Fujimori and leader of the nationalist and ultraconservative party Fuerza Popular, and surpasses the former mayor of Lima, the Trumpist Rafael López Aliaga (8.1%), according to an Ipsos survey published in early April.
