Two leading candidates for presidency will compete in a runoff in May as none of them garnered more than 50 percent of the votes needed to win Peru's presidential election on Sunday, the preliminary results showed.

With 45.16 percent of the votes counted, the Central Election Commission said late Sunday night that former army leader Ollanta Humala got a slim lead with 27.32 percent of the votes, followed by conservative Lourdes Flores with 26.45 percent and social-democratic former president Alan Garcia with 26.05 percent.

About 16.50 million voters cast their ballot in 4,041 ballot stations on Sunday all over the country.

The commission also said that the ballot results could change because the current votes counted were mostly from urban areas. While Humala's bastions are in the provinces, especially in the rural areas, where he is expected to come out on top to enter the runoff.

Eighteen candidates competed in the presidential election, of whom two had withdrawn shortly before the poll.

Under the Peruvian constitution, if no candidate gets 50 percent of the votes, the top two vote-winners stand for a runoff, and the one with simple majority wins the presidency.

Source: Xinhua