Alejandro Toledo, running an uphill campaign for president of Peru, has been lagging behind President Alberto K. Fujimori among Indian women, despite his strong Indian features.
So when Mr. Toledo arrived in Sicuani, a town 12,000 feet high in the Andes known for its Indian markets for llama skins and alpaca wool, he warmed up the crowd in the central plaza by handing the microphone to his wife, Eliane Karp.
As a strawberry blond, Belgian-born, naturalized American, Ms. Karp seems like an odd campaign weapon in Peru. But she speaks the ancient Inca language of Quechua and she is one fiery speaker.
''There has not been a good government for 500 years!'' Ms. Karp bellowed, in a blanket attack on every ruler of Peru since the Spanish conquered the Inca empire in the 16th century. ''Do not be fearful and do not listen to the liars. With the force of the Inca, Alejandro can create a great government!''
The crowd cheered wildly, seemingly not caring that Ms. Karp's Quechua, like her Spanish, is inflected with her native French. Ms. Karp looks more like a tourist than a Peruvian, but few Peruvians know their country's traditions and its Huayno folk dances better than she does. All of this makes her one of Mr. Toledo's potent political assets.
Peruvian politics tend to be highly idiosyncratic and unpredictable, and the current election has been no exception with all its charges of fraud and extreme nastiness in the news media. But perhaps the most unusual ingredient of the campaign so far has been Ms. Karp, a 46-year-old anthropologist who says she found her political identity in her Jewish roots.
''My vision of Judaism is one of light and justice that is totally impossible to reconcile with dictatorship,'' she said in an interview, adding that one turning point of her life was her becoming interested in indigenous cultures while studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the early 1970's. ''I learned in Israel that you don't take no for an answer,'' she said.
The other turning point in Ms. Karp's life was meeting Mr. Toledo in 1975 when they were students at Stanford University. They have had a stormy marriage marked by years of separation but finally a firm political alliance. ''Alejandro and I think together on the pillow at night,'' she said, ''just as we did in university when we used to go to the pinball machine to figure things out when I had problems with my dissertation.''
Now she says she plans to break the mold of Peruvian first ladies. She wants to use the experience she had as a consultant for the World Bank and the United States Agency for International Development to remake agricultural production in Peru, using many of the techniques that have made the Israeli desert bloom.
Ms. Karp's open ambition and her outspoken criticism of machismo and espousal of feminist causes have opened her up to charges that she is a foreign interloper and a wild-eyed leftist. Newspapers that support Mr. Fujimori have written much about their marital problems, contending that she and Mr. Toledo are actually divorced -- a charge she denied. ''She shouldn't intervene in Peruvian politics,'' said Francisco Tudela, Mr. Fujimori's vice presidential running mate. ''She is not a Peruvian.''
But whenever Mr. Toledo is in trouble, he turns to his wife. When a report surfaced two months ago that he had an illegitimate daughter whom he refused to support, it was Ms. Karp who denied the charge on a television talk show, saying, ''I know the man I am sleeping with.''
In the days after the first-round vote on April 9, as charges of fraud mounted, Mr. Toledo and Ms. Karp spoke to the masses from the roof of a Lima hotel. Her words were particularly explosive, with a reference that recalled the defiance of protesters in 1988 in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. ''I will stand by my husband and we will not move,'' she said. ''Let the tanks roll!''
More recently, Ms. Karp came forward with the fantastic claim that government intelligence agents had twice kidnapped her husband and filmed him in compromising circumstances. So far the videos have not surfaced, but political analysts say she probably took away their shock value if they are released in the final days leading up to the May 28 runoff.