John Rapley
COMMENTATORS ARE already drawing links between last Sunday's Peruvian election and the leftist tide said to be sweeping Latin America. Indeed, reports from Washington suggest that the White House is anxiously regarding the possibility that another ally to Hugo Chavez will soon take power.
Both parliamentary and pre-sidential elections occurred. It was the latter that drew the most attention, though. In it, a retired army officer named Ollanta Humala emerged as the leading candidate. However, he fell well short of the majority needed to win the election outright. So, the election will go into a run-off round. The final result will thus not be known for more than a month.
What must be worrying to Washington is that the candidate most to its liking, Lourdes Flores, is unlikely to make it through to the next round. Instead, Humala will probably square off against Alan Garcia, a scarcely more palatable candidate to the White House than Mr. Humala. Mr. Garcia, a gifted orator and populist, was Peru's president in the late 1980s. He led an inept attempt at socialist transformation which left his country wracked by hyper-inflation and corruption.
Mr. Humala makes him look good.
Any effort to depict Mr. Humala as the next Chavez will not survive long. Like Chavez, he is a military man. He is also a fierce nationalist and a populist with a strong base among the country's poor. But he is little of a socialist. His politics fit more accurately into the Latin American tradition of authoritarian populism: clientelistic, suspicious of democracy, and anti-American.
Indeed, Mr. Humala once tried unsuccessfully to overthrow an earlier Peruvian president, Alberto Fujimori. That may speak volumes: being able to outscore Mr. Fujimori on the authoritarian index is no mean feat.
BENEFITS BUT SUFFERING
A Humala presidency may well bring short-term benefits but long-term suffering to Peruvians. But from where many of them stand, that may not be as bad as it sounds. After more than a decade of neoliberalism, the country is coming off several years of impressive economic growth. But there is little evidence that most of these gains are finding their way into the pockets of ordinary Peruvians. And the ethnic divide which has resurfaced in the politics of neighbouring countries like Bolivia is becoming more acute. It also drives much of Mr. Humala's support.
The problem is that the advocates of Peru's neoliberal course offer more of the same, and not much else. Theoretically, they may be correct in saying that if Peru remains on course, ordinary people will eventually see the benefits. That is, after all, what happened next door in Chile.
The problem, of course, is that theories do not fill stomachs. The populist alternative may amount to little more than redistribution followed by economic implosion. Venezuela's experience currently seems to offer that lesson.
DIFFICULT TO GOVERN
Nevertheless, whoever wins the eventual run-off will find it difficult to govern. The parliamentary elections have returned a fragmented and divided legislature. It will be a challenge for anybody to pass legislation without a good deal of compromise. The concern of many observers is that a Humala presidency would find ways to undermine democratic procedures in order to proceed with its agenda.
In the end, this election signals a failure of neoliberalism. The pity is that polls still show that Peruvians would like to continue with a free-market course. They are not hankering after socialism. But their neoliberal leaders have offered them little more than an unswerving faith in free markets. Their arrogance, like that of the increasingly derided Washington consensus, looks set to be punished.
Hugo Chavez may not get what he wants, but neither will Washington.
John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
