Oh! Susana

APINK tide of left-wing election victories
may have washed over much of
Latin America in the past decade, but
Peru has been a notable exception. The
reasons are not hard to discern. The far
left was discredited by the terrorist violence
unleashed by the Maoist Shining
Path and Marxist Túpac Amaru guerrillas
in the 1980s and 1990s. Just as disastrously,
the left’s economic recipes produced
hyperin ation and slump during the
presidency of Alan García between 1985
and 1990. In contrast, the economy has
grown vigorously for most of the past 15
years under right-of-centre presidents,
currently the self-same Mr García, now
reinvented as a neoconservative.
But is Peru’s left at last poised for a
revival? If the opinion polls are correct,
Susana Villarán, a human-rights activist
who is standing for a new left-wing party
called Fuerza Social (Social Force), will be
elected mayor of Lima, the capital, on
October 3rd. It would be the rst time the
left has won the capital since 1983.
Ms Villarán’s rise in the polls has been
sudden and unexpected. A popular
conservative candidate, Alex Kouri, was
disquali ed on a technicality. That was
expected to bene t Lourdes Flores, another
conservative who twice ran for
president. But support for Ms Flores, a
lawyer, began to slip when it was revealed
that she had advised a convicted
drug tra cker. Then tapes surfaced of
phone calls in which, bizarrely, she said
she wasn’t very interested in being
mayor anyway. Such illegal telephonetapping
has besmirched Peruvian politics
since it was deployed against opponents
by Alberto Fujimori, a conservative
president who revived the economy in
the 1990s but is now in jail.
Ms Villarán is a moderate who promises
clean and e cient municipal government.
But if she wins, and if her allies do
well in other cities and regions next
month, that will cast uncertainty over the
outcome of a presidential election due in
April. In 2006 Mr García won only narrowly
against Ollanta Humala, a populist
former army o cer who sympathised
with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. Since
then Mr Humala’s star has waned. Partly
because of the economy’s strong growth,
he has tried to repackage himself as a
centrist. Even so, the polls suggest that he
would be easily beaten in April by several
centrist and conservative contenders,
including Mr Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko.
Ms Villarán does not support Mr
Humala, but some in her party do. As the
presidential vote draws nearer, the left’s
support may rise. If it does, it will be
because of the aws of the right as much
as the virtues of the left. Mr García has
failed to stamp out rampant corruption in
his party, and his government has not
done as much as it might to use increased
tax revenues to make social programmes
more e ective.