David Frum, The Atlantic: “The first choice facing voters is a little-known union leader who leads a Marxist-Leninist party that wants to rewrite the constitution to eliminate congress. The alternative is the daughter of a former dictator who has surrounded herself with kleptocrats and COVID-19 deniers. Welcome to Round 2 of the Peruvian presidential election. How did one of the success stories of the developing world end up in such a crazy place?”

“Many democracies have suffered a collapse of the political middle, but few so starkly as Peru – or so unexpectedly. For years, Peru reported some of the highest growth rates in South America. It reduced the proportion of its people in poverty from 58 percent in 2004 to 23 percent by 2014. Exciting new mining discoveries promise more growth ahead. Instead, even before COVID-19 struck, Peru faced a dissolution of familiar political structures. The country has rotated through five presidents or acting presidents since 2016. Then came the terrible shock of the pandemic. Peru has endured one of the highest excess-mortality rates on Earth from COVID-19, if not the very highest: 503 deaths per 100,000 persons, according to a global survey by The Economist. The economic carnage has been correspondingly awful, too. The disaster discredited whatever remained of the former political ways. Parties of the left and center collapsed. The round of voting on April 11 was topped by a union leader so obscure that nobody even bothered to poll for him until November 2020 – and who did not rise above 3 percent in the polls until early March 2021. Pedro Castillo was introduced to many Peruvians by a goofily endearing TikTok dance video. But the content of Castillo’s politics is troublingly resonant with the late Hugo Chávez’s attack on Venezuela’s once-democratic institutions. Castillo has called for the rewriting of Peru’s constitution to replace the elected congress with representatives of unions and other interest groups. He has spoken of nationalizing industries and restricting foreign investment and trade.”

“In shocked reaction, Peru’s non-left has rallied since April 11 to Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the president-dictator who crushed the Shining Path insurgency in the 1990s. Alberto Fujimori fell from power in 2000, and the question of what to do about him has bedeviled Peruvian politics ever since. He was convicted of human-rights abuses in 2009 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Peru’s then president pardoned the elder Fujimori in 2017, but that act was overturned by the Peruvian supreme court in 2018. The release from prison of the now-82-year-old former dictator is a central issue of his daughter’s 2021 presidential campaign.”