LIMA, Peru -- Setting the tone for his run-off election campaign, Alejandro Toledo on Saturday said last week's massive street protests prevented President Alberto Fujimori from stealing a third term.
"If the people had not taken to the streets respectfully, in peace, raising their voices, there would already be a fraud consummated," Toledo told reporters.Fujimori, opening his second round campaign Friday night before a huge crowd in a Lima shantytown, slammed Toledo for creating an atmosphere of social upheaval that he said could plunge Peru back into the violence and economic disaster of the 1980s.
"The Peruvian people are aware. They will not choose options that would bring disorder, demagoguery," Fujimori told the crowd. In contrast, he said, his proposals are "serious, based on national objectives and not on group interests."
Fujimori fell just shy of the majority he needed last week to win another five years in office after a campaign and election so riddled with government abuses and accusations of fraud that much of the international community insisted on a second-round vote.
A three-day delay by election officials in producing the final returns raised suspicions of vote fraud and set off dozens of mostly peaceful street protests by tens of thousands of Toledo supporters.
Fujimori denies that any election rigging occurred and has downplayed mounting evident of irregularities, saying they had no significant impact on the outcome.
The two candidates will face off in late May or early June, and Fujimori's government has promised to implement a series of reforms suggested by the Organization of American States to prevent a repeat of the first-round irregularities.
Fujimori came to power in 1990 and was re-elected in a landslide in 1995 by Peruvians grateful to him for taming a bloody left-wing insurgency and ending runaway inflation.
The 61-year-old president said Toledo's spending promises would cause an "unmanageable" deficit equivalent to 10 percent of the gross domestic product and hurl Peru back into the economic chaos of the late-1980s.
Toledo, 54, an economist who once worked as a shoeshine boy, pledged a first-year deficit of no more than 2 percent.
He challenged Fujimori to debate publicly to explain how he intends to pay for his pre-election promises, including free hospital care for pregnant women and newborns and state-subsidized land for as many as 700,000 of Peru's mostly poor population of 25 million.