Lima, Nov 16 (EFE).– Peruvian presidential candidate Pedro Pablo Kuczynski announced that he has given up his U.S. citizenship as the right thing to do before the 2016 elections.

Kuczynski, a former economy minister, said Sunday night on the television news program “Cuarto Poder” that he has taken the necessary steps to renounce his U.S. citizenship because the other candidates were applying “tremendous pressure” for him to do so before the upcoming elections in Peru.

He said he also believed that the president of Peru “should only have a Peruvian passport” to avoid repeating scandals like that of the disgraced former head of state Alberto Fujimori, “who made use of his Japanese passport to resign by fax from Japan.”

Kuczynski said that he went ahead and relinquished his U.S. nationality when he decided to run for president in 2011, but applied to renew it when he lost.

The leader of the PPK party is currently in second place in the polls with a voter preference of 16 percent, far behind the head of the Fuerza Popular party, Keiko Fujimori, daughter of Alberto, who has racked up 34 percent, according to results of the latest survey released on Sunday.

Should she fail to garner half the votes plus one in the first round, Fujimori is calculated to beat Kuczynski in the runoff with some 50 percent of the vote, compared with 35 percent for the ex-minister. EFE