Peru - Castillo declared president
Fujimori’s sustained assault on the electoral institutions of the country will challenge the president and also make it more difficult to call out when Castillo begins crossing the lines he shouldn’t.
Peru’s electoral authorities finally declared Pedro Castillo the winner of the election after exhausting the entire process for appeals. Castillo will take office next week as scheduled.
Peru’s electoral institutions held firm in spite of a sustained legal and public relations attack by Fujimori against them. The officials who worked Peru’s elections deserve a lot of credit for their resilience and professionalism. It’s a strong sign for Peru’s democracy. There are many countries in this hemisphere where electoral institutions are among the weak points where authoritarians and authoritarian wannabes can take advantage. Peru was not one of them this year.
At the same time, damage has been done. Keiko Fujimori says she has accepted the decision of the electoral authorities while also stating that she still believes Castillo’s victory occurred via fraud. A small portion of the population considers Castillo illegitimate and a larger important portion of the population now questions the fairness and accuracy of the vote counting process. Even in losing, Fujimori has left potential tripwires and traps in the system that she or some future candidate may use to try to unfairly manipulate the institutions.
The claims of fraud also set the stage for the next round of Fujimori’s legal battles. The day Peruvian prosecutors go to throw Fujimori in prison (more likely sooner than later), she can and will claim that it is a revenge plot by her political opponents including President Castillo. That the charges have solid evidence and pre-date Castillo’s rise to power won’t stop her from attempting to manipulate the reality of the situation. Certain international allies of Fujimori’s will use her claims of politicization to undermine Castillo from abroad, casting doubt on his legitimacy as president and his ability to implement his policy agenda.
The prosecution of Fujimori will raise the issue of how to separate politicized from legitimate anti-corruption efforts, especially in situations where there is a bit of both going on. That Fujimori deserves to be prosecuted for corruption and that she ran for president in order to dodge those charges are essentially indisputable facts. But there are reasons for concern that Castillo will politicize the judicial system against his opponents even as he benefits by having some opponents including Fujimori who deserve their punishment. Figuring out if and when Castillo crosses that line will be a challenge for analysts and civil society.
One issue to monitor is the status of the corruption charges against Vladimir Cerrón. The leader of the Peru Libre party faces punishment for corruption during the time he was governor of Junín. Prosecuting Fujimori would not necessarily indicate a politicization of the system, but letting Cerrón off the hook definitely would be a bad mark on Castillo and would give some ammunition to Fujimori’s claims.
As I wrote a few weeks ago, Castillo seems on track to start his term with some relatively moderate economic policies. One threat is that he may radicalize those policies after the initial months. Another threat is that he begins to undermine non-economic issues like anti-corruption and judicial reform early in his term even as his economic team keeps markets stable and the business community happy.
Fujimori’s challenges to Castillo’s election win have set up potential instability and threats to the president-elect. But those challenges have also given the president-elect the potential justification for more radical policies to consolidate his victory and control of institutions given how his political opponents have acted in the weeks since the election. Peru’s election institutions may have held up well, but the rest of the country’s democratic institutions will have a hard time maintaining stability amid an ongoing battle between those two extremes.