Rolo on Tour

Toledo, Keiko, Castañeda, Ollanta, Kuczynski, Nique, Rodriguez, Belaunde, Reymer, Pintazo and Noriega. Who are these 11 people? No, it is not the peruvian national soccer team. (Of course you knew that as there is no Pizarro on the list.)
It’s the 11 candidates who want to become the next president of Peru. The first round of voting will be on the 10th of April. After this date the 2 candidates with the most votes will run in a second round for presidency.
Having travelled a lot through Peru I could not miss the ongoing election campaign and I want to point out in this entry some interesting aspects.

First note that in Peru you don’t have the right to vote, but the duty to do so. If you fail to do that you gotta pay a certain amount as a penalty. As a consequence for the campaign the candidates also try to win the people who don’t care. The best way to do that seems to be to flood the whole country with advertising. But they usually don’t do it with posters, instead they paint „XY (Insert preferred candidate here) presidente“ on all the houses. Or some rocks in the middle of nowhere. Note that as there are some illiterates in Peru, it is also important to put your symbol down there. Now the strategic choice of a symbol can be quite important: You want to have one which people can easily remember and recognize. Toledo has a T, Keiko a K, Ollanta an O and Kuczynski PPK (that are his initials). Only Castañeda wants to have it complicated and has chosen a sun.

Not surprisingly the candidates with the most advertising are favorited right now in the elections. Let’s look closer at the first 5 right now, the others don’t really play a role for the outcome.

The last presidents of Peru have been: Garcia -> Fujimori  -> Toledo -> Garcia . Fujimori is now in prison for crimes he committed during presidency. Interestingly enough his daughter Keiko has announced to get him out of prison, should she win the election. For me such an announcement would make somebody impossible to vote, but Peru seems to have a different opinion as she is on second place in the surveys right now.

The favorite right now is Alejandro Toledo who was president before. And he proposes the same things he did before and which he did not achieve: plenty of jobs, cheap products, new hospitals, new railroads. So why would it work this time?

Castañeda was the mayor of Lima before. I don’t really know what his goals are, but seeing his face on television a lot, he must have gotten a facial lifting for sure :-).

Ollanta is the nationalist candidate, who is very popular in the south of Peru. That is where he also does most of his advertising. He is a buddy of venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and his political agenda reflects that.

Kuczynski is also known as the gringo, as he also got a US citizenship. He is the oldest candidate, but surprisingly his campaign is approaching the young people of Peru. Funny thing he actually wants to have a youth ministry. Not hard to guess whose votes he wants to get with that proposal.

So to put it simple, all candidates suck. But I guess it’s like that most of the time and you gotta choose the least evil.

The campaign itself is quite similar to Germany. The candidates tour around the country holding speeches everywhere. The way they do that though reminds me more of a rock concert. No wonder each candidate has his own song praising him. How do I know that? Well, there are for example cars driving around playing these songs super loud all day. Appears to me like brain washing. Well let’s see who does that best!

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