The New Yorker. A Surprising coalition brings a new leader to Peru.

The economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski won Peru’s Presidential election this week, beating his rival, Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a disgraced and imprisoned former President, by the thinnest of margins—a mere thirty-nine thousand votes out of nearly eighteen million cast.  In every sense, Kuczynski is a member of his country’s social, political, and economic élite. Seventy-seven years old, he was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, and at Princeton; he has, at various points in his career, worked at senior levels of the World Bank, been an investment banker on Wall Street and a mine manager in Guinea, and has served as Peru’s Prime Minister, minister of economy and finance, and minister of energy and mines. He is also a onetime student of the Royal College of Music, an accomplished flautist and pianist, and the owner of a white grand piano that once belonged to Noël Coward.

Kuczynski, or P.P.K., as he is popularly known, for the initials of his name, is a first-generation Peruvian. He is the son of a German-Jewish doctor, Maxime Hans Kuczynski, a renowned tropical-disease specialist who left Hitler’s Germany for Peru in 1936. Among other legacies, the elder Kuczynski helped found the leprosarium of San Pablo, in the Peruvian Amazon, where the young Argentine medical student Ernesto Guevara, soon to become Che, volunteered for a time in the early nineteen-fifties. Kuczynski’s French-Swiss mother, Madeleine Godard, was a teacher of literature and music. Kuczynski’s full name, in fact, is Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard—Jean Luc Godard, the film director, is his first cousin. His brother Miguel was the head tutor at Pembroke College, Cambridge; an uncle was a Nobel Laureate for Medicine. And so on. His longtime friend, the former journalist Christopher Roper, told me, “It is impossible to think of a Latin-American head of state over the past hundred years with the intellectual distinction, independence of mind, and cultural breadth of P.P.K.”

The ties that bind Kuczynski to the wider world are not only European. His first wife was an American named Jane Casey, the daughter of Joseph Casey, a congressman from Massachusetts. His second wife, Nancy Lange, also an American, is a first cousin of the actress Jessica Lange. One of Kuczynski’s daughters, Alex Kuczynski, is a former journalist for the New York Observer and the Times, and the author the book “Beauty Junkies: Inside our $15 Billion Obsession with Plastic Surgery.” Kuczynski himself had U.S. citizenship, which he renounced only last November, in order to run for Peru’s Presidency.

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