Thursday, June 2, 2011

Oh my stars! What a horrible feeling

I actually agree with Andres Oppenheimer...ugh, icky feeling of spiders crawling crawling all over me and hot'n'cold flushes and everything. Here's how LatAm's normally most annoying columnist finishes his admittedly good piece on the Peru election:

My opinion: I know I’m going to disappoint many of you by saying this, but I’m skeptical about both candidates’ claims that they will respect Peru’s democratic institutions. I feel like Fernando de Szyslo, Peru’s best-known living artist and one of Mario Vargas Llosa’s best friends, who said in an interview with the daily El Comercio: “I’m sorry, but I can’t vote for any of them.”
I guess that many Peruvians feel the same way, and will vote exclusively on pocketbook issues. The poorest of the poor will vote for Humala, and the emerging middle classes for Fujimori.
On Sunday, we will find out whether, after two decades of growth in which poverty rates dropped from 54 percent to 31 percent of the population, Peru has already become a middle-class country, or whether a majority of Peruvians feel they have been bypassed by their country’s prosperity.