Sánchez overtakes Fujimori in Peru count with 95% tallied; overseas vote still to come
Key takeaways
- Leftist Roberto S nchez moved ahead in the count of Peru's presidential runoff, in an election being decided vote by vote.
- Fujimori had led the count in the early hours thanks to support in Lima, one of her strongholds, but lost ground decimal by decimal as tally sheets arrived from rural and Andean areas, where S nchez performs best.
- The outcome could hinge on the overseas vote, whose count had not yet begun and whose tally sheets will finish arriving on Wednesday.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
Leftist Roberto S nchez moved ahead in the count of Peru's presidential runoff, in an election being decided vote by vote. With about 95% of the tally sheets processed by the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE), S nchez had around 50.1% of the vote, against 49.9% for conservative Keiko Fujimori, a lead of some 41,000 ballots. The result, however, is not final: the votes of Peruvians abroad, historically favorable to the right, have yet to be counted.
Fujimori had led the count in the early hours thanks to support in Lima, one of her strongholds, but lost ground decimal by decimal as tally sheets arrived from rural and Andean areas, where S nchez performs best. About 4,700 tally sheets remain to be processed, including those from abroad and from remote regions such as the Amazonian Loreto.
The outcome could hinge on the overseas vote, whose count had not yet begun and whose tally sheets will finish arriving on Wednesday. More than a million Peruvians were eligible to vote outside the country; in the first round, just over 400,000 did so, mostly favoring the right. The executive president of the pollster Ipsos, Alfredo Torres, warned that, despite S nchez's partial lead, most of his internal projections give the win to Fujimori, since the current count includes almost nothing of the foreign vote.