Disgruntled Peru Voters Turning Left in Search of Solutions

Troubled Peru, at once disgruntled and entranced with its young democracy, is moving left in search of new solutions to old problems.

Centrist and rightist alliances that have historically dominated political life here collectively managed to poll less than one vote in five in Sunday’s presidential election.

Victory went instead to Alan Garcia, a charismatic 35-year-old populist who heads the left-of-center American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, a political movement that for six bitter, also-ran decades, has tried to win the presidency.

In a nine-candidate race, Garcia finished with about 48% of the vote, and on his coattails, the alliance, popularly called the Apra party, won effective majorities in both houses of Congress, according to unofficial returns released Monday.

Only a disputed quirk of electoral law that requires blank or spoiled ballots to be included in the overall totals stopped Garcia from achieving the absolute majority required to avoid a runoff election in June. He won a majority of the valid votes cast; 10% of the total ballots were blank or spoiled.

Garcia’s victory was so overwhelming that an eight-party Marxist coalition, whose candidate, Alfonso Barrantes, finished second with about 23%, may throw in the towel without contesting the runoff or may offer only nominal opposition.

Barrantes ran less strongly than the Marxists expected, receiving less than the 29% his coalition won in 1983 municipal elections. Center-right Social Christian Luis Bedoya Reyes finished third with 11% Sunday, while Javier Alva Orlandini, candidate of outgoing President Fernando Belaunde Terry’s Popular Action Party, managed only 5%.

Belaunde himself, constitutionally barred from seeking a second consecutive term, won applause from across the political spectrum for his even-handed supervision of the elections, which yielded results that could only have been galling to him personally.

Amid great Marxist comings and goings Monday, hard-liners insisted that the Garcia-Barrantes runoff proceed as scheduled. They conceded that there is no chance of beating Garcia but said they favor a vigorous second campaign as a vehicle for crystalizing national political debate.

Barrantes himself, a wry political realist who is mayor of Lima and an independent Marxist without party affiliation, is thought to see scant virtue in a grueling, head-to-head confrontation with Garcia that he cannot hope to win.

The disappointed Marxist coalition had hoped to profit most from national disillusionment with failures of Belaunde’s centrist government.

Belaunde returned democracy to Peru in 1980 after 12 years of military rule. But initial jubilation quickly soured amid a steep, prolonged, across-the-board economic decline that has accentuated social tension and the volatile gap separating the few Peruvian rich and the many poor.

The Marxists argued that bourgeois, reformist democracy had failed. They urged profound structural change. Voters agreed that they wanted a change, but one less radical than Barrantes promised.

In numbers that surprised all but a few audacious pollsters, Peruvians heeded Garcia’s new-broom appeal to elect “a nationalist, democratic and popular government.”

Equally dramatic was the electorate’s rejection of revolutionary violence as a preferred response to national economic and social ills. Maoist guerrillas who have bedeviled Belaunde for all five years of his rule failed to discourage the turnout or to disrupt the electoral process in any significant way.

The most that Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the guerrilla organization, had to show for its sporadic, anti-election terror were two dead children, victims of an indiscriminate dynamite bomb in the Andes. While 8 million voters went to the polls in an orderly and impressive manner, Peruvian newspapers reported the arrest of a senior guerrilla commander.

If the auguries are correct, Sendero Luminoso may prove to be one of the lesser headaches to afflict a new government led by Garcia, a tall, lean lawyer with an innate stage presence.

Since becoming Apra’s secretary general in 1982, Garcia has nudged the party rightward a few notches toward the political center. Causing discomfort at times to older, more traditional party members, Garcia and his young guard have successfully portrayed Apra as a multi-class, social democratic party committed to political pluralism.

In the process, he has conquered hostility toward Apra within the armed forces, but he still must overcome suspicion from the private sector and conservative political foes who fear that once in power, the party will become authoritarian.

Although his aura of leadership is evident, Garcia has critics who complain that he is almost entirely without administrative or govermental experience. Apart from his party duties, Garcia’s only role in public life before becoming a candidate was a lackluster two years in the lower house of Congress.

Garcia has been vague so far about the Apra government program. One reason, he said in a pre-election interview, is to avoid awakening expectations that cannot be fulfilled. Among his early goals, though, are import restrictions as a way of reinvigorating sluggish Peruvian industry and a shift in development priorities toward greater agricultural production, particularly of foodstuffs that now have to be imported.

Garcia’s commitment to “anti-imperialism,” an old rallying cry of his party, presages a more assertive foreign policy, oriented toward the Third World, and a tougher line with the International Monetary Fund and American banks that are the principal creditors of an unpayable $13.5-billion foreign debt. Garcia says debt renegotiation will be one of his early goals.

Although he has done some post-graduate work in Spain and France, Garcia has had remarkably little exposure to the United States for a South American of his age and social class.

Fearing that a young, inexperienced, populist Peruvian government could blunder into unwanted friction with the conservative Reagan Administration, some of Garcia’s advisers are urging him to visit Washington before the change of government here, scheduled for July 28.