LIMA, Peru — Alejandro Toledo, a U.S.-trained economist with Indian roots, finished first in Peru's presidential election Sunday but fell short of a majority and will face a runoff, according to exit polls.
He will likely face former President Alan Garcia, a left-leaning populist, in the runoff, the polls showed. A field of eight candidates were vying to become the successor to disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori.
Toledo, 55, finished second to Fujimori in elections last year but ended up boycotting a fraudulent runoff against the autocratic leader, who fled Peru in November amid mounting corruption scandals.
Toledo received 40.1 percent of the votes, falling short of the majority needed to avoid a runoff, according to Apoyo, Peru's most prestigious polling firm. Two other polling firms gave similar results.
He faced his strongest challenge from Garcia, a discredited ex-president returned from exile, and Lourdes Flores, a conservative former congresswoman.
The Apoyo poll gave Garcia 24.3 percent and Flores 22.8 percent, but Apoyo said the race for the second spot in the runoff was too close to call until official results were in.
Alfredo Torres, director of Apoyo, said 30,000 voters were interviewed, and the margin of error was 5 percentage points.
The election was Peru's first since the ouster of Fujimori, Peru's iron-fisted ruler for more than a decade.
A year ago, Fujimori trampled constitutional restrictions and won a third five-year term in elections marred by fraud and dirty tricks. But he fled in November amid mounting corruption scandals involving Vladimiro Montesinos, his intelligence chief.
In a televised speech to the nation Saturday night, interim President Valentin Paniagua assured Peruvians that this year's special elections would be clean and fair.
"Let's show the world, which is watching our election process with concern, that here there is a people who know how to exercise their democratic rights and deserve to live in democracy," said Paniagua, who is heading a caretaker government until a new administration takes office in July.
Toledo, who has a doctorate from Stanford University and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, is a "cholo," the Peruvian term for a person of mixed Indian and white blood. He has capitalized on his rise from shoeshine boy to an economist with the World Bank.
"My candidate is Toledo because he is a cholo like me," said Juan Hurtado Rivera, 59, who lost a high-paying job in a state petroleum company when it was privatized under Fujimori's free-market economic program.
"He did a lot to force out Fujimori, who did so much damage to the country," said Rivera, who now works as a tailor out of his small home. "He deserves to be rewarded with the presidency. He is offering more work and we have to support him."
Flores, 41, is a member of Lima's white elite with a reputation for honesty. Garcia, a tall, silver-tongued populist, led Peru's government from 1985 to 1990. His administration left the country mired in hyperinflation and surging guerrilla violence.
Nearly 15 million Peruvians were registered to vote for president as well as a new 120-member Congress. But most polling firms said more than 20 percent of voters were still undecided about how to cast their ballots in the last days of the campaign.
"I'm going to leave my ballot blank for president and congressmen because I don't trust the offers of the candidates. They have all disappointed me," said Jose Huatuco, 60, a street vendor.
Voter malaise is due in part to the deep corruption discovered in Fujimori's government. Secretly recorded videotapes unearthed since Fujimori's ouster document Montesinos, now a fugitive, buying political favors with bribes to election officials, lawmakers, judges, generals, business leaders and media heads. Dozens of distinguished Peruvians have been tainted by the scandal.
Mudslinging and racial slurs have dirtied the election campaign, with candidates accusing one another of resorting to the sleazy tactics that Fujimori's regime used against his opponents.
Toledo faced allegations he fathered a child out of wedlock and tested positive for cocaine use after a hotel rendezvous with three women. Flores charged that her foes were preparing a smear campaign involving accusations she is a lesbian.
In the closing days of the campaign, Toledo's wife, Eliane Karp, a Belgian anthropologist who speaks the Indian language Quechua, lashed out at "the little whites" in Lima. "A cholo government will come whether they want it to or not," she said.
A few days later, Flores' father referred to Toledo as "that llama from Harvard." Used in that sense, llama is an old racial slur against Indians that translates roughly as "jackass."