Peru's politicians closed their campaigns a few minutes before midnight Thursday and began the traditional two-day silence imposed by Peru's electoral law ahead of Sunday's voting.

The 20 presidential candidates repeated their campaign pledges at festive political rallies and made use of their last pre-vote stump speeches to attack their rivals.

Slogans included "we will not defraud you", "orderly change", "no to improvisation", "reducing poverty", "solidarity" and "a revision of contracts for natural resource exploiters".

Polls show three candidates are leading the race: the Peru Nationalist Union's Ollanta Humala, the right-wing National Union's Lourdes Flores and the social democratic PAP's Allan Garcia.

Polls also indicated that none of the candidates would garner the more than 50 percent of votes needed for an outright win in the first round, which means a runoff would be needed between the two leading candidates in 30 days.

Around 16.5 million Peruvians, including 400,000 living overseas, are eligible to vote for the president and 120 legislators.

Source: Xinhua