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Confined in a cell in Chile, disgraced ex-president Alberto Fujimori could not run for a third term in Peru, but had cause to celebrate as his daughter Keiko won a congressional seat.
"This triumph is not mine, it is Alberto Fujimori's," Keiko Fujimori told the Chilean daily La Tercera after partial counts showed she was not only elected to the 120-seat Congress, but also got more votes than any other candidate in Lima, and possibly nationwide.
"The support is due to the Peruvian people's support of my father," said Keiko, 30, who for years acted as her father's first lady.
The 67-year-old former president watched Sunday's election on television from the Santiago prison where he has been held since November.
He was joined by his new wife, Japanese hotelier Satomi Kataoka, 39 -- their first visit together since the two married last week by sending representatives to Japan to file marriage documents on their behalf.
Alberto Fujimori's hopes to run in Sunday's presidential were dashed when he was arrested in Chile as he tried to head home after five years of self-imposed exile in his ancestral Japan.
Peru has requested his extradition to face charges of corruption and human rights violations during his 1990-2000 presidency.
Following his arrest, his daughter tried to register him as a candidate, but authorities pointed out he had been banned from seeking public office for 10 years after he fled the South American country in 2000.
In the absence of its main star, the pro-Fujimori camp fielded one of his most militant supporters, Marta Chavez, and his brother Santiago Fujimori as running mate. They scored around seven percent of votes in the presidential election.
Ironically, candidates who railed against the former president will now court Chavez and Ms Fujimori in a bid to form new alliances, as none of the parties garnered a congressional majority and the top two presidential candidates will face off in a second round of voting.
"Now they have started to treat us with respect, and flirt with us. But we take those advances with a grain of salt," Keiko Fujimori told La Tercera.
The pro-Fujimori Alliance for the Future is projected to get 14 seats in the Congress, which Alberto Fujimori shut down together with the courts in 1992, so he could have wider powers to combat leftist insurgencies.
Fujimori is wanted in Peru in connection with the 1992 events and on charges of embezzlement and corruption as well as human rights violations that include alleged responsibility for abductions, homicides and torture of leftist opponents.
The former president insists he is innocent and a victim of political persecution.
While he remains a controversial figure, he still draws support in Peru. Opinion polls conducted before his arrest showed he would be among the top two candidates if he could run in the presidential.
Fujimori is credited with reining in economic chaos and leftist insurgencies during his presidency, but his detractors say he achieved that by riding roughshod over democracy, civil liberties and human rights.
He resigned by fax from a Tokyo hotel room in November 2000 at the height of a massive corruption scandal. Congress rejected his resignation and fired him for "moral ineptitude."
Before he flew to Chile, Tokyo had refused Lima's requests to extradite Fujimori -- the son of immigrants from Japan -- and granted him Japanese nationality.
A father of four, Fujimori divorced his first wife Higuchi in 1994 after a noisy, public row in which he kicked her out of the presidential palace and dismissed her as first lady in favor of Keiko.
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AFP 111746 GMT 04 06
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