Castillo confirmed as president, as nation awaits July 28th speech
On July 21st, more than a month after the June 6th second round of the presidential election, the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones (JNE, the National Election Tribunal) is due to announce that Pedro Castillo Terrones of the Perú Libre party has won the election, and will become Peru’s 63rd president. Castillo’s inauguration is scheduled for July 28th, when he is expected to unveil his Cabinet, and to deliver his acceptance speech, laying out the main policies for his five-year presidential term.
This may have been the most fraught presidential election since 1931. As then, the defeated candidate (now Keiko Fujimori, in 1931 Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre of the APRA party), failed to acknowledge defeat, even after the JNE had reviewed close to 900 ballots that Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular party disputed, as well as another 200 disputed by Perú Libre. On top of this, close to 1,300 ballots were identified by the Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales (ONPE, the institution in charge of organizing the elections) as containing irregularities or impugned votes by the members of either party at election stations.
Given this backdrop, the next president’s legitimacy and, by extension, ability to reach out to the 50% of the population that failed to vote for him, may be put into question. While the runoff has deeply divided the country between the less developed rural population and the more sophisticated urban one, the post-electoral process has only deepened this division, and had made it more difficult to reconcile. Both candidates have seen their support diminish, and Castillo has failed in his attempts to attract opposition supporters, and to thereby gain legitimacy.
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