Peruvian radical leftist lawmaker and presidential candidate Roberto Sánchez announced on Tuesday that he will not recognize the victory of conservative former first lady Keiko Fujimori, as Peru’s slow vote-counting process nears its end.
Peru has marked more than three weeks without any final results from the extremely close June 7 presidential runoff election between Fujimori and Sánchez. The election, much like its first round, has been marred by a slow vote-counting process by National Electoral Processes Office (ONPE).
As of Wednesday morning, with 99.859 percent of all votes counted, Fujimori holds a 43,386-vote lead against Sánchez. In the past days, Fujimori has extended her once extremely narrow vote lead over Sánchez as the last batches of vote tallies, including foreign votes cast by Peruvians living abroad, were counted. While international outlets stated on Wednesday that it is “mathematically impossible” for Sánchez to take the lead with only 0.141 percent of the votes left to count, no Peruvian authority has proclaimed a winner at press time.
Sánchez, a lawmaker running for president representing the Together for Peru far-left coalition, told reporters on Tuesday that he will not recognize an eventual Fujimori government because, according to him, there has been a “serious disruption of the electoral process,” suggesting irregularities with the overseas vote in which the conservative candidate obtained an overwhelming victory. The candidate argued that changes in the foreign vote logistics purportedly carried out by the Peruvian Foreign Ministry affected the “transparency” of the process. Sánchez called for a rally for Saturday, June 27, in response to a possible Fujimori victory.
“For us, this serious irregularity approved by the ONPE amounts to an ongoing fraud, because the votes cast at consular offices continue to be counted,” Sánchez reportedly claimed.
“We call on the social movement and the democratic forces to restore democracy to Peru, so that we do not face another five years of the hijacking of democracy and our institutions, as has been happening under Ms. Fujimori’s parliamentary government. We call for democratic resistance in our regions and throughout Peru,” Sánchez said.
RPP noted that, on June 8, one day after the presidential runoff election, Sánchez had affirmed that he would recognize the results of the election regardless of the outcome.
In recent days, Together for Peru sought to file a request before Peru’s electoral authorities seeking to nullify a significant amount of the votes cast by Peruvians abroad.
Foreign votes were crucial in allowing Fujimori to take the lead against Sánchez as the final votes rolled in. Per ONPE’s preliminary results, Fujimori obtained 63.2 percent of the foreign vote, while Sánchez only obtained 36.7 percent. Per the preliminary results, Fujimori obtained a more than 81,300 vote difference among foreign voters.
Hours after Sánchez delivered his remarks, Radio Programas del Perú (RPP) reported that a Special Electoral Jury in Lima rejected the requests presented against the foreign votes on grounds that Together for Peru filed them twelve days after the established legal deadline and because the far-left coalition failed to pay the corresponding submission fees as stated by local law. Per RPP, a Special Electoral Jury in Lima Centro instead issued a call for attention to the conduct of the representatives of the leftist coalition. The Special Jury also reportedly rejected other requests filed by other individuals against voting tables in the United States, France, and Spain.
The far-left candidate further affirmed that the Saturday rally will demand the “freedom” for Marxist former President Pedro Castillo, who was arrested and removed from office in 2022 following an attempt to unconstitutionally dissolve Congress and stage a “self-coup.” Castillo was convicted in November to 11.5 years in prison.
On Tuesday, ONPE released a public statement indicating that the institution is waiting for the resolution of voting minutes reviewed by the Special Electoral Jury (JEE) to tally them into the total vote count, finally concluding the vote-counting process.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.