Amid Pressure, Peru Announces Runoff Election

Amid extraordinary international pressure and nationwide street protests, officials announced Wednesday that President Alberto Fujimori has been forced into a runoff with challenger Alejandro Toledo, according to near-final vote totals in Peru’s troubled presidential election.

The 10-year incumbent failed to win the 50%-plus-one necessary to win outright, according to Jose Portillo, the beleaguered head of the federal election agency. With 97.68% of the ballots counted after a much-criticized delay in the tally, Fujimori had 49.84% of the vote and Toledo had 40.31%. Seven other candidates split the remaining votes.

The uncounted votes could only change the result by 0.05%, Portillo said Wednesday evening, making a runoff inevitable. As he made the announcement, a crowd of thousands of Toledo supporters filling the colonial San Martin plaza here erupted into cheers, expressing pent-up emotion that had built over three suspense-filled days.

Toledo, a Stanford-educated economist from an impoverished indigenous village, appeared on a hotel balcony to kiss a Peruvian flag and exult in his moment of glory.

“I have come to announce to you that collective democratic stubbornness has just triumphed,” declared Toledo, who had led protest marches and refused to accept the election results unless a runoff was declared. “There will be a second round.”

The government’s announcement defused a worrisome political crisis surrounding one of the most problematic elections in the recent history of Peru and the region. It came after an unusual barrage of public and private pressure for a runoff from U.S., European and Latin American diplomats, who cited allegations of widespread irregularities and five independent projections showing that Fujimori had failed to win.

The situation had grown tense and almost bizarre before the announcement Wednesday, with the government maintaining a stony silence for much of the day despite having announced results of 90% of the vote Tuesday night.

Fujimori’s two-fisted campaign tactics and control of the media and government institutions had provoked allegations of foul play from international observers well before Peruvians went to the polls Sunday. Then the worrisome delay in the vote count exacerbated charges of irregularities, including use of pre-marked ballots, tampering with election computers, and coercion and interference by the powerful military and intelligence services.

Nonetheless, Peruvian election officials on Wednesday defended the legitimacy of the process.

“There is no possibility of manipulation,” Portillo declared indignantly. “This is a faithful reflection of the popular will.”

The crisis had threatened to push Peru an unfortunate step backward after a decade in which elections in Latin America have been generally clean and efficient, despite the lingering weakness of democratic institutions and the ravages of violence and poverty.

“There would be real problems of governability if the election results were not accepted by half the country and the international community,” said Eduardo Stein, chief of the observer mission for the Organization of American States.

The 61-year-old Fujimori has shown himself to be steel-willed and resourceful in crises, but he now faces an unusually united and inspired opposition and a citizenry expressing profound anger at his authoritarian style.

And Fujimori’s defiance--he insisted that the election was clean and said foreigners had no business dictating the results--has strained relations with a once-admiring diplomatic community. The U.S., in particular, sees him as a key leader in a nation of strategic importance to an Andean region torn by drugs, guerrillas and political and economic instability.

In Washington, the State Department welcomed Peru’s announcement about the runoff, saying it was a first step toward restoring credibility to the electoral process.

On Tuesday, the House of Representatives had passed and sent to the White House a resolution, previously approved by the Senate, warning that if the election was considered unfair by international observers, the United States would “review and modify as appropriate its political, economic and military relations with Peru.” The lawmakers called on the Clinton administration to “work with other democracies in this hemisphere and elsewhere toward a restoration of democracy in Peru.”

In addition, Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering in Washington led a blitz of phone calls to high-level Peruvian officials urging them to accept the inevitability of a runoff, according to a knowledgeable foreign official.

“The U.S. pressure was brutal,” the official said.

And on Wednesday, many Peruvians were convinced that the government had backed down from a plan to “doctor the data,” as one official put it, and declare Fujimori the winner. Whether or not the pressure played a role in the final numbers--and whether or not sinister forces were prevented from perpetrating a fraud--Peru has pulled back from the edge of the kind of turmoil that recently toppled a president in neighboring Ecuador.

The runoff will take place in about six weeks, and it promises to be a brawl. Toledo has demanded that the government take steps to improve a playing field widely regarded as unfair. He wants a new election oversight agency staffed by neutral officials, access to fiercely pro-government television channels and limits on use of government resources in the president’s behalf.

In addition, the widely respected human rights ombudsman here has proposed establishing a code of ethics to prevent a repetition of the first round’s lurid personal attacks on candidates by tabloid newspapers regarded as tools of the intelligence service.

Although Toledo has momentum, the race will be tough. Fujimori retains great popularity in the countryside, where peasants say he has improved their lives. Moreover, the president will be sure to contrast his undisputed strength as a leader who defeated terrorist groups and hyper-inflation against Toledo’s inexperience and impetuousness.

Toledo has obvious charm and a gift for oratory, but many observers say he did not handle himself well during these potentially explosive days. They criticize him for leading a rowdy march on the presidential palace on election night and making off-the-cuff and contradictory statements that give a sense of improvisation and unsteadiness.

*

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington and researcher Mariana Sanchez Aizcorbe in Lima contributed to this report.