Peru Voters OK New Constitution in Narrow Victory for President : Latin America: Ballot is seen as a plebiscite on Fujimori’s first 3 years. Narrower-than-expected margin casts shadow on his reelection bid.

Voters approved a new Peruvian constitution Sunday, but the administration of President Alberto Fujimori failed to clinch the overwhelming victory it had predicted only two weeks ago, raising doubts over the outcome of Fujimori’s expected bid for reelection in 1995.

Preliminary exit polls by the Lima polling firm Apoyo showed 55.3% in favor of the charter and 44.7% against. Official results will be released later this week.

At a brief press conference Sunday night, Fujimori said: “I’m going to try and find out the reasons why 45% voted ‘no.’ . . . Undoubtedly a percentage voted against the referendum because of disinformation and distortions.”

An Oct. 14 poll indicated that 64% of the voters approved the constitution, with 36% against. Only days before the referendum, however, approval for the constitution had dropped to 59% and prospective “no” votes had risen to 41%.

Fujimori has admitted that the referendum was “transformed into a plebiscite” on the first three years of his five-year term rather than reflecting opinion on the new constitution. Indeed, surveys indicate that few Peruvians have actually read the new charter. As a result, analysts say the president envisioned getting 70% of the votes to match his similarly high popularity rating.

The new constitution is the country’s 12th since independence from Spain in 1821 and the first to go to a referendum.

It goes into effect 1 1/2 years after the April 5, 1992, seizure by Fujimori of broad powers in a military-backed “self-coup” that shut down the Congress and suspended the 1979 constitution. Bowing to international pressure that condemned his one-man rule, Fujimori called elections for the Constituent Congress that wrote the new constitution.

The referendum “closes a parenthesis that was opened April 5,” said Jaime de Althaus, deputy managing editor of the Lima newspaper El Expreso. “ . . . It ends an era and in that sense legitimizes April 5. . . .”

Fujimori and his supporters expected to win by a much wider margin, and last week the president said a defeat at the polls “would oblige me to resign. . . . It would create a climate of political instability, and the framework for investments would be seriously threatened.”

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The new charter limits the role of the state to basic services and infrastructure and sets the framework for a free-market economy, in keeping with the liberal reforms sweeping Latin America.

Fujimori’s detractors have accused the government of using public funds to finance a nationwide advertising blitz whose jingle, “Say ‘yes’ to the Peru you love,” has saturated the airwaves since September.

A disparate opposition, composed mostly of the right-of-center Accion Popular, the populist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance and the left, could barely muster a few flyers urging voters to vote “no.”

“The ‘no’ campaign acted at a more underground level, involving a lot of rumors and personal contacts, as then-candidate Alberto Fujimori did in 1990,” said Apoyo pollster Alfredo Torres.

In 1990, political neophyte Fujimori trounced novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in runoff presidential elections.

Fujimori relied on voters disillusioned with traditional politics in a word-of-mouth campaign that catapulted him into the presidential palace. Foremost among his supporters were Peru’s estimated 1 million evangelical Christians.

Sunday, that same force helped turn voters against Fujimori. “We feel used and manipulated,” said Caleb Meza, who heads Peru’s National Evangelical Council.

Meza and fellow church members object to the establishment of the death penalty in the new constitution and say that the provision on presidential reelection, which for the first time allows a president to have consecutive terms, has transformed Fujimori into “the incarnation of a personal tyranny.”