“It is a symptom of the precariousness of politics and politics. We are in a scenario where a feeling of failed representation has deepened and that accumulates more and more frustration”, commented the social psychologist Hernán Chaparro in the weekly Hildebrandt en sus Trece.
The analyzes are similar in the different regions: voters are dissatisfied with candidates who are often limited to demagogic offers and who, in several cases, have a long history of corruption behind them.
“The majority of citizens are voting because they are forced to do so,” summarized analyst Paulo Vilca. The between 46 and 92 soles (from 12 to 24 dollars) that those who do not go to the polls will have to pay as a fine have become in many cases the only incentive to exercise the right to vote.
According to a survey commissioned from the Institute of Peruvian Studies by the newspaper La República and published this week, 68% of citizens do not feel represented by any politician. Although these leaders grow during electoral times, in the meantime there is no connection.
President Pedro Castillo, an independent from the left, was the one who received the most support in this regard, but only with 6%, followed by the ultra-nationalist military Antauro Humala, an anti-system who has just been released from prison after 17 years, with 4%.
Former presidential candidates Keiko Fujimori and Rafael López Aliaga, leaders of the radical right-wing parties Fuerza Popular (FP) and Renovación Popular (RP), respectively, and former interim president Martín Vizcarra, who is enlisting his own party, Perú Primero (centre-right), they are the only others that manage to appear, but with barely 3% of mentions.
“We see how far politicians are from the average citizen. Not from the left, center or right, neither generates a programmatic, affective or clientelistic connection. They are broken ties,” political scientist Arturo Maldonado, from the Fifty Plus One consulting firm, commented on these results.
It is in the midst of this precariousness of representation and the feeling of political stagnation due to the permanent clashes between the Government and Congress, that elections characterized by apathy will be held.
The fight for mayor of Lima, a city with just under 10 million inhabitants that concentrates almost a third of the national population, is the one that arouses the most expectation with three former presidential candidates, Daniel Urresti, López Aliaga and George Forsyth, fighting side by side. elbow for the win.
Urresti, a 66-year-old retired Army general who is accused of the murder of a journalist and the rape of a peasant woman, led the polls for the right-wing Podemos party from the beginning, with his single-issue proposal to fight insecurity, but in recent days he has seen his adversaries approaching.
López Aliaga, a 61-year-old millionaire tourism businessman, a member of Opus Dei, who boasts of his chastity and his self-flagellations and who handles a virulent discourse against the left and progressivism, is close in the polls and has the possibility of giving him a triumph over RP, an ultraconservative party of which he is the maximum national leader.
Forsyth, a former professional soccer player and former mayor of the populous La Victoria district of Lima, 40, who represents the center-right party Somos Perú (SP), closed the gap at the last minute, especially because he generates less resistance from the left and center sectors.
The left, which always has difficulties in Lima, was on a slight upturn with Gonzalo Alegría, but everything fell when a complaint of sexual harassment made against him by his own son became known, which led even sectors of the Together for Peru party to withdraw him. your support.
Five other candidates are in competition, apparently with no chance of victory, although in electoral Peru nothing can ever be ruled out. Among the laggards is Professor Yuri Castro, of Peru Libre, the Marxist-Leninist party that brought Castillo to power.
Unlike Lima, where parties of national scope dominate, in the interior these groups face, as is customary, the tough competition of regional movements that cannot be included in the same bag, since they have different positions that can include the whole range, from the extreme right to the extreme left.
The polls, which have not been released since last Sunday, point to very close finishes in almost all major departments. The biggest exception seems to be La Libertad, where former presidential candidate César Acuña, leader of the center-right Alianza Para el Progreso party, has a considerable advantage.
In other large departments, such as Arequipa, Cajamarca, Lambayeque, Cusco, Junín, Puno and Áncash, the fight is close between three, four or even five candidates, so it is not ruled out that in some cases there is a need for a second round if none reaches 50% of the votes.
The current 25 governors have accumulated 577 investigations by the Prosecutor’s Office, which makes corruption another protagonist of the process. And among the 488 candidates to replace them, 89 are already or have been in the sights of the Public Ministry.
Of the 75 governors elected in the current term or the two previous ones, 10 are in jail, two under house arrest, one a fugitive, five with suspended prison sentences (free, but under rules of conduct) and 25 face advanced legal proceedings.
The sum of weak parties, candidates who do not meet expectations and throbbing corruption also occurs in the fight for mayors, including those of the districts, which embody the first unit in the territorial division.
Thus, broad sectors feel “unrepresented” and “probably feel increasingly disaffected by democracy,” warned anthropologist Pavel Aguilar. “It could be a breeding ground for authoritarian projects of all kinds,” he warned.
Source: Ambito
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