Lima – A new poll showed Tuesday that Ollanta Humala, a populist former army colonel likened by many to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, will have a harder time in Peru’s presidential runoff election than he did in the first round, in which he was the top vote-getter.
Former President Alan Garcia leads the nationalist Humala by eight percentage points in the latest survey, carried out last week by the Datum firm.
Garcia, despite the disastrous economic effect of his first administration from 1985-90, was the choice of 54 percent of respondents while Humala, like Chavez a former failed coup plotter who appeals to the poor, had the support of 46 percent.
Ironically, conservative Lourdes Flores, barely edged out by Garcia for the second spot in the runoff, appears from the survey as a slightly stronger opponent for Humala in the second round, set for May 28.
Fifty-six percent of respondents told Datum that in a Flores-Humala race they would be inclined to vote for the attorney who had hoped to become her nation’s first woman president, versus 44 percent for the nationalist. The poll has a margin of error of 3 percent.
Humala took just under 31 percent in the first round April 9. Garcia got 24.3 percent, to 23.7 percent for Flores.
Last week’s poll found 16 percent of likely voters saying that they planned to cast blank ballots in next month’s runoff, reflecting widespread disillusionment about the choices facing Peruvians.
Both Humala and Garcia will need to seek alliances as they try to cobble together an electoral majority for the second round.
Though Humala, 43, styles himself as the “anti-establishment” candidate, his critics say he is anti-democratic and too chummy with Venezuela’s Chavez, who has publicly endorsed the Peruvian’s bid for power.
Observers here expect Humala to further moderate his views in hopes of appealing to those who voted in the first round for centrist ex-head of state Valentin Paniagua, to supporters of former, and now jailed in Chile, President Alberto Fujimori and to backers of National Restoration, a party led by a Protestant pastor.
Those three factions between them garnered 17 percent of the vote April 9 and winning them over appears to represent Humala’s only real chance of victory, since it is assumed that most Flores partisans – some of them figuratively holding their noses – will cast ballots for Garcia.
Conservatives are seen as all but certain to vote for Garcia in their zeal to stop Humala.
The 56-year-old Garcia, whose first stab at governing left Peru struggling with hyperinflation and a virulent Maoist insurgency, has demonstrated sensitive political antennae by saying that if he receives “the people’s mandate,” he will establish a “social front” in the interests of governability.
Garcia, who spent several years after his first term in self-exile to avoid prosecution on corruption charges, has said that he would govern with a broad-based coalition.
No party emerged from the April 9 legislative balloting with anything close to a majority in the 120-seat unicameral Congress. Humala’s Union for Peru and the Garcia-led APRA picked up about 40 seats each.
The election results also highlighted growing social polarization in Peru, leading some to suggest that only a “strategic alliance” transcending class divisions will allow the Andean nation’s badly discredited politicos to recover any credibility.
Humala recently has distanced himself somewhat from the radical nationalism of the organization founded by his father, Isaac, which in the past has called for setting up a government along the lines of the Inca empire, abolishing all forms of currency, nationalizing foreign companies, legalizing coca farming and jailing homosexuals, among other policies.
Isaac Humala founded the Etnocacerista movement, a group that takes its name from military commander and President Andres Avelino Caceres, a hero of Peru’s losing 1879-1883 War of the Pacific against Chile.
The movement fosters xenophobia against Chile, the United States and Israel as part of a platform that also includes indigenous demands and Inca myths.
