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Peru president eyes blow to oppn in congressional polls

Lima: President Martin Vizcarra looks set to break the opposition stranglehold on Peru's Congress as legislative elections get underway on Sunday, the first time they have been held separately from a general election.

The vote comes just 15 months ahead of the next general election, and after Vizcarra successfully dissolved Congress in September in a bid to break a political crisis over repeated clashes with the Keiko Fujimori-led opposition.

Fujimori's Popular Force party held an absolute majority in the single-chamber legislature with 73 out of 130 seats, but on Sunday they are expected to suffer a drubbing at the ballot box, largely due to the wide-ranging Odebrecht corruption scandal that snared Fujimori in its tentacles.

Fujimori is accused of accepting USD 1.2 million in illicit party funding from the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht for her 2011 election campaign.

Odebrecht has admitted to paying at least USD 29 million to Peruvian officials since 2004, and bribing four former Peruvian presidents.

"Popular Force thinks it can win 20-25 congressmen, but compared with the absolute dominion it had, it will lose a lot," analyst Luis Benavente, director of the Vox Populi consultancy, said the reporter.

"Fujimorism will be the big loser in this election." Popular Force has been the major bloc in Congress since the last election in 2016, but Fujimori is expected to pay for being implicated in the Odebrecht scandal that saw her spend 13 months in pre-trial detention until she was released in November.

The 44-year-old daughter of jailed former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) has seen her popularity plummet and she may even be sent back to pre-trial detention on Tuesday when she faces the courts once again.

"The election winner is going to be Martin Vizcarra, because he will have managed to change the hostile Congress of the last few years," political analyst Augusto Alvarez said the reporter.

Popular Force's main allies in the legislature, the social-democrat APRA, have also been hurt by the corruption scandal.

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