The phrase you encounter most often in coverage of Peru's election is "record field" [21]. Thirty-five candidates stood for president in the first round. That is not a typo. Thirty-five. The Spanish Wikipedia tells us [8] this produced "una fuerte dispersión de los votos" — a strong dispersion of the votes — which is the sort of phrase you use when you are being polite about chaos.
What nobody quite says aloud is that thirty-five candidates is not a sign of democratic vitality. It is a sign that the word *party* has ceased to mean anything. When Keiko Fujimori placed first in the first round with 17% of the vote [8], she did so by winning less than one vote in five. Roberto Sánchez, the left-wing candidate who will face her in the runoff, came second by an even thinner margin. The right-wing vote split three ways — Fujimori, Rafael López Aliaga, and a constellation of others whose names appeared on ballots the size of tablecloths. The left consolidated behind Sánchez. This is the structural fact that polling obscures: Fujimori leads in the runoff surveys at 39% to Sánchez's 35% [28], but that four-point gap sits atop a first round in which the right collectively won more votes than it knows what to do with.