Peru staged a national strike on Wednesday. Thousands of workers walked out demanding that Pedro Castillo be formally announced as president-elect, nearly three weeks after his election victory was declared.
The Workers’ General Confederation and Castillo’s Free Peru party called the action amid growing fears of a Bolivian-style coup to prevent the self-declared Marxist-Leninist from taking up the post.
The National Election Jury (JNE) has not yet officially declared Castillo as the Andean country’s president-elect. Despite this announcement, the result of the poll is putting him ahead of rival Keiko Fujimori by about 44,000 votes.
It anticipated that it had to deal with a slew of legal challenges submitted by Fujimori, the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori who is serving a 25-year jail sentence on corruption charges.
She has made unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud, demanding that some 200,000 votes are annulled, making her the winner of the June 6 election.
Peru’s Front for Democracy & Governance (FDG) supported peaceful general action. It said that while some provinces of the country held “a massive strike,” others held protests and sit-ins.
Castillo has called on the JNE “to respect the popular will” of the people and has already changed his social media profiles to read “president-elect of Peru”.
