Who is Pedro Castillo, Peru’s presumed president-elect?

The official vote count gives Castillo a slim margin over rival Keiko Fujimori, who is contesting the results.

Lima, Peru — More than most presidents-elect, Pedro Castillo, Peru’s apparent new leader, will need to put his transition team to work as soon as possible. On the one hand, a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic looks increasingly likely in the Andean nation, which already has by far the world’s worst per capita COVID-19 mortality. The highly contagious Delta variant has just been detected in Arequipa, with the authorities scrambling to cut off Peru’s second city from the rest of the country. On the other, Castillo, 51, a radical left outsider who no one — apparently including the candidate himself — expected to win, ran a chaotic campaign, frequently contradicting himself and delaying for weeks revealing whether he even had a policy team, claiming that he did not want his expert advisers to be “stigmatised” by the media.