Area: Latin America - ARI 68/2006 (Translated from Spanish) Date: 29/6/2006 García Wins: What Comes Next? Carlos Malamud ∗ Theme: The result of the Peruvian election has dispelled the main uncertainty present throughout the campaign: who will be the next president of Peru. However, it has also raised a large number of questions. Summary: The results of the second round of Peru’s presidential election have dispelled the main uncertainty: who will be the next president of Peru. However, numerous questions remain, many of them involving the country’s internal politics and others relating to the multiple realignments that are now occurring in the region. Among the former, the greatest challenge facing the new government is governability on several fronts, starting with political and parliamentary alliances to ensure the continuity of the new government. Another major issue is the future of Ollanta Humala and his Nationalist Party –not an insignificant matter given the different paths that Hugo Chavez’s self-proclaimed Peruvian followers may take (some institutional, others more radical or violent)–. From a regional perspective, the most interesting issues involve the more or less leading role the new government may wish to play in saving or rescuing the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), its backing of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the United States (and what kind of agreement it will pursue) and its degree of rapprochement with Brazil and Chile. At the same time, it is quite likely that the conflict between Peru and Venezuela will wind down in the immediate future, with the two ambassadors returning to their posts. In any case, this situation will make it possible to gauge how much room Hugo Chávez has to manoeuvre at the regional level, considering that he will soon be directly immersed in his own election campaign. Analysis: Why Did García Win? Without going into a detailed analysis of the results of the Peruvian election it should be said that several factors led to García’s win in the second round and that it is difficult to emphasise one more than the others. However, the question is worth asking, since in light of many analyses it would seem that García was the loser and, hence, Humala the winner. The following are the most important factors to bear in mind to understand the election result: (1) In political and territorial terms, the Peruvian Aprista Party (PAP) was more firmly established than Ollanta Humala’s Union for Peru (UPP). While the APRA is a long-standing party with a well-oiled party machinery in terms of its presence throughout the entire country, the UPP essentially revolves around Humala. It should be borne in mind that Humala could not even run for the Nationalist Party – the ad hoc party he founded in 2005 to take part in this election– and had to borrow a different acronym (UPP) for his bid. Also, while the PAP had representatives at all polling stations, UPP supporters covered only 60% of the country’s polling stations. Unlike what occurred with Alberto Fujimori and Alejandro ∗Senior Analyst, Latin America, Elcano Royal Institute 1 Area: Latin America - ARI 68/2006 (Translated from Spanish) Date: 29/6/2006 Toledo, on this occasion political organisation proved stronger than the (greater or lesser) presence of a charismatic leader. (2) Beyond comparisons of the two candidates and attempts to determine which of them is more charismatic than the other (which does not make much sense), it is clear that García is a more experienced politician than Humala and has a greater command of political staging –and discourse–, in addition to the organisational backing mentioned above. In this regard, García’s proposals, revolving around his key campaign slogan, ‘A responsible change’ –‘Un cambio responsable’–, were more coherent and better articulated than his rival’s. Humala may be a politician with a bright future, as some Peruvian political analysts suggest, but he still has a lot to learn. His late arrival at the only televised debate between the two candidates and the incident with the Peruvian flag at the start of that debate bear witness to this. At the same time, he contradicted himself and lied many times throughout the election campaign. (3) As a result –and despite the fact that the second round was a showdown between the two candidates who were most disliked among all those who took part in the first round– Alan García epitomises the old saying: ‘Better the devil you know...’. It is clear that the memory of his first, disastrous government came to bear, but it is also clear that some voters were influenced by memories of Fujimori (obviously, not those who voted for his political representatives) and the fact that he was an outsider who entered politics only to take power on a nationalist, populist and openly confrontational platform. It is also significant that the population of Peru is very young and that many new voters were children during the first García administration. (4) The set of negative factors surrounding Humala became increasingly important when he became clearly linked to Hugo Chávez –his relationship with the Venezuelan leader, his trips to Caracas (including one during which he was virtually proclaimed Chavez’s candidate), suspicions about the provenance of the funding for his campaign– and, especially, when Chavez became openly involved in Peruvian politics, which President Toledo and candidate García called ‘meddling’ in the presidential campaign. Chávez’s recent appearances on Aló presidente, especially the programme broadcast from Tiahuanaco (Bolivia) in the company of Evo Morales before the election, clearly showed the extent of this involvement. (5) Although nearly 50% of Peruvians live below the poverty line –and this is most visible in the departments in the south of the country–, the constant and continued macroeconomic growth in Peru in recent years has reached a not insignificant part of the population, notwithstanding the social and regional asymmetry it has caused. It was precisely this part of the population (including the urban middle classes) that saw the extravagant populism of Ollanta Humala as an attack on their own positions and on the continuity of the macroeconomic policies now in place. This explains why a significant number of voters opted to support García. Peru: A Divided Society? An idea that has lately become popular in political analysis is that countries split into two opposing halves after hard-fought elections. When certain elections end up being determined by a very small margin between two main options, it seems that these countries are inevitably considered to be immersed in irreconcilable conflict. There was talk of a divided Italy and now of a divided Peru; but there are not two halves in Germany and Bolivia, although obviously for different reasons: in Germany, because there is a broad coalition government of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, and in Bolivia 2 Area: Latin America - ARI 68/2006 (Translated from Spanish) Date: 29/6/2006 because Morales won with 54% of the vote (paradoxically a very similar figure to that obtained by García). However, some say that on the night before the election on Sunday, 3 June, Peru was a single country and that 24 hours later a split had occurred; but in fact Peru’s social and regional divisions date back a long time. Figure 1. An increasing number of Latin American presidential elections are finally decided in a second round. And where two-party politics is the norm (Chile and the US, for instance), it is not unusual for the electorate to vote in a relatively proportional way, especially in hard- fought elections. The lesser political and ideological differences in the pledges made to voters –compared to what tended to happen in the past– mean that elections are very often decided by a difference of very few votes between the main contenders (Costa Rica is a clear example of this). But does this justify talk of two different countries? Not necessarily. Let us take a look at how Peruvians voted. In the first round, Ollanta Humala received 25.7% of the vote (slightly less than 3.8 million), compared with Alan García’s 20.4% (nearly 3 million votes). By contrast, in the second round, García received 52.8% (6.7 million votes) vs. Humala’s 47.2% (6 million). This means that both in absolute numbers (772,000 votes in the first round to 705,000 votes in the second) and in terms of percentages (5.3% to 5.6%) the difference between the first and second rounds remained constant, although the positions of the two main rivals were reversed. Thus, while García managed to more than double his votes, adding 3.75 million, Humala only won 2.25 million additional votes. 3 Area: Latin America - ARI 68/2006 (Translated from Spanish) Date: 29/6/2006 With respect to the distribution of votes around the country, in the first round the UPP won in 18 departments, the PAP in six and the UN in one (Lima). In the run-off, apart from winning in Lima, the PAP edged out the UPP in the departments of Pasco, Tumbes and Ucayali, while the UPP won in 15 departments and the PAP in ten. As a result, nearly the entire coast (except for the south) was won by the PAP, while the interior (except for a central strip along Pasco and Ucayali –see the map above–) went to the UPP. At the same time, it is worth noting the very unequal distribution of the population in the various departments. While Madre de Dios has less than 100,000 inhabitants and Moquegua has only 160,000 (both won by Humala), Lima has a population of over 8.1 million.