Outsider Not Surprised by Edge in Polls : Peru: His opponent for president is closing the gap. But the Japanese-Peruvian front-runner maintains his backers are a majority.

Alberto Fujimori sat in his living room and watched himself star on the evening news: driving his tractor unannounced into the poorest of Peru’s slums and then, from atop his “Fujimobile,” berating Peru’s oligarchy before a cheering throng.

The bespectacled university administrator was buoyant as he noted high points in the replay of his campaign rally a few hours earlier. And he was not the least bit surprised by its success.

This son of Japanese immigrants, making his first run for public office, may be the only person in Peru who is not stunned by his extraordinary rise from obscurity to front-runner in the two-man runoff for the presidency.

The question now is whether the Fujimori tsunami, or seismic wave, will subside as quickly as it arose. Novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the favorite until Fujimori’s sudden first-round surge, again is campaigning with fervor, and he is narrowing Fujimori’s lead in opinion polls. Many analysts say either man could win in the June 10 runoff.

Vargas Llosa, leading a right-wing coalition, had seemed certain of victory back when Fujimori was lumped among “others.” The author had detailed policies, ample funding and the ear of much of the media as he stridently attacked past administrations and promised a new “people’s capitalism.”

But Fujimori was rewriting the script. Known inaptly as El Chinito (the Little Chinese), he cast himself as the moderate champion of Peru’s forgotten poor, the cholitos , a sometimes-derogatory term in Peru and and elsewhere in the Andes for Indian peasants.

“We are the majority,” Fujimori told one rally. “We are a Chinito and cholitos, but we are the authentic people of Peru.”

He stormed into second place in the April 8 first-round ballot, and many of Peru’s centrist and leftist politicians, who share a dislike for Vargas Llosa, now support Fujimori. But his continued refusal to disclose detailed proposals has raised skepticism about his ability to run the nation effectively.

Vargas Llosa’s lieutenants dismiss Fujimori as a populist demagogue who has no organization of substance behind him. The writer’s partisans charge that Fujimori’s vaguely proposed gradual reform will merely ensure a further slide into hyper-inflation of well over 2,000% a year, declining wages and, inevitably, more suffering for the poor.

For both candidates, it is an almost furtive campaign, politics by stealth. Fear of attacks by radical Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas means that campaign appearances are announced at most a day in advance. Often, especially in risky areas, the candidates simply show up and hope people will gather.

After a monthlong respite in which both candidates took stock and vanished from sight, they resumed campaigning in early May. Characteristically, Fujimori headed for the poor barrios, avoiding specifics and raising the pitch of his derisive attacks on Peru’s elite.

Vargas Llosa tried to apply some of Fujimori’s own tactics, plunging into the poor areas, though with smaller crowds and sometimes hecklers. He now emphasizes his Democratic Front coalition’s detailed plan for a huge social program for the poor to ease the impact of the adjustment.

A mid-May poll showed Vargas Llosa actually leading for the first time in Lima, home to about one-third of Peru’s 22 million people. Lima-only polls can be misleading, although they do suggest voter trends.

Yet Fujimori is clearly more comfortable in Lima’s squatter camps and forgotten inland mountain towns, where he built his surge. He wears blue jeans with turned-up cuffs and drives his tractor, which has become his trademark, into the dusty settlements; Vargas Llosa, trying to shed an upper-crust image, rides in a bulletproof four-wheel-drive vehicle but then walks alone with the poor, no longer surrounded by so many white aides.

The pro-Fujimori press took delight in noting that Vargas Llosa’s campaign caravan got lost recently while trying to find one of the many slums that ring Lima. The subliminal message: Try as they might, well-to-do conservative whites are not at home in much of what makes up modern Peru.

Even some of Vargas Llosa’s supporters acknowledge that Fujimori saw and filled an empty space in the political spectrum, galvanizing hundreds of thousands of people who function in the black-market world that accounts for half of Peru’s moribund economy.

Felipe Ortiz de Zevallos of the Apoyo polling firm said that Vargas Llosa was always well to the right of most Peruvians and further polarized the electorate with talk of “shock” adjustment programs.

“The people have the impression that Vargas Llosa is going to pull out their molars to achieve this shock,” he said.

Fujimori framed it this way: “It isn’t a matter of center, right or left. You must see it rather as above, center and below. A political vacuum existed in the center and below. These sectors did not have the attention of the political parties or the government. We have recognized their aspirations.”

Fujimori, who spent $197,000 for his first-round campaign, has attacked the Democratic Front for its $12.3-million campaign, including a contract for the New York advertising firm of Sawyer/Miller Group, when so many Peruvians are hungry.

“Ours was a very white campaign. Few mestizos (mixed-race people) were visible,” a Vargas Llosa aide admitted, and he said that Sawyer/Miller “had no idea what Peru is about. You have to feel Peru with your fingertips.”

Vargas Llosa reportedly was so dispirited the night of the first-round ballot in April that he nearly quit the race.

Fujimori preempted Vargas Llosa’s role as an independent nonpolitician. Even among those who respected Vargas Llosa and his ideas, many worried about his friends--traditional conservative parties and prominent whites.

Jose Gomez, a government worker with four children attending a Fujimori rally in the squatter settlement of Huaycan, called Fujimori “a miracle from God, because at a hopeless moment a new person arrived who wasn’t like the old faces who failed.”

Fujimori, a 51-year-old agronomist and former head of the university rectors’ association, said his own immigrant heritage has been a factor in winning over the urban newcomers.

“This is part of my message,” he said. “As I said to the people of Huaycan, they too are first-generation Peruvians, immigrants from the highlands living in a hostile area like Lima. And there was a tacit identification.”

The tiny Japanese community, just 60,000 people of the 22-million population, is quiet; some members fear a backlash if Fujimori wins and fails to govern well.

“The Japanese are seen here as hard workers, savers, scrupulous,” sociologist Carlos Franco said. “Those are the same characteristics of Peru’s new microbusiness owners and ‘informals.’ So the Japanese are the super-ego of the cholos. “

Vargas Llosa, 54, has sought to keep race and racism out of the campaign and quickly denounced the suggestion by one of his spokesmen that an immigrant’s son ought not be president of Peru. To add to his problems, Vargas Llosa was the subject of scathing remarks by Julia Urquidi, his first wife, who is also his aunt.

“When we married, he was a snob, but not rich. I don’t know why this gentleman has ended up giving such importance to money, to the extent of putting himself at the head of the bourgeoisie whose values he made fun of when he was my husband,” she said in an interview from La Paz, Bolivia, where she now lives, that was reprinted by the anti-Vargas Llosa newspaper La Republica.

Religion became an emotional issue in the race this week when the Roman Catholic archbishop of Lima publicly criticized “the insidious campaign unleashed against our faith by so-called evangelical groups. . . .”

Fujimori is Catholic, but many supporters in his Cambio 90 (Change 90) movement are from Peru’s growing evangelical Protestant churches. Some churches have criticized Catholic practices, and a number of evangelical clerics have openly endorsed Fujimori from the pulpit.

Fujimori followers in turn criticized the Catholic Church for leaning to Vargas Llosa, a professed agnostic. An estimated 90% of Peru’s population is Catholic.