After a long vote count, Keiko Fujimori won the presidency, on her fourth attempt, by a margin of around 45,000 votes. The dictator’s daughter — whose party has carried significant weight in a Congress marked by corruption and authoritarianism — will now seek to overcome Peru’s chronic political instability, something that, in light of her record, carries grave risks for democracy.
On her fourth attempt, Keiko Fujimori finally won the presidency of Peru. She managed to defeat Roberto Sánchez, leader of a left-wing coalition that championed Pedro Castillo — the president who beat her in 2021 and has been imprisoned since 2022 for attempting a self-coup. After losing by fractions of a point in 2021 and 2016, this time she likewise won by fractions of a point, reflecting a country seemingly split almost exactly in two halves: Fujimorism and anti-Fujimorism.
What happened?
Despite a decade of political crisis and five years of democratic erosion, Peru managed to hold free and competitive elections. The authoritarian coalition that has governed from Congress since 2022 captured almost all the institutions that could limit its power, except for some judicial bodies and the electoral authorities. Nonetheless, by eliminating the open, simultaneous and mandatory primaries (PASO), it sought to fragment the already scattered electoral field even further: without that filter, there were 35 presidential candidacies.
In the first round, Fujimori reached the runoff with 17% of the vote and Sánchez with barely 12%; together they accounted for less than 30% of the valid votes. This is a singularity in the region, evidence of extreme electoral fragmentation. The vast majority of the 35 candidates fell below 10%. A logistical failure by the electoral authority in Lima — the stronghold of Rafael López Aliaga, the capital’s far-right former mayor and a presidential candidate — gave him a pretext to allege fraud and call for a “civil insurgency” that fizzled out within weeks.
The runoff was again decided by fractions of a point, as in 2016 and 2021, though for the first time in Fujimori’s favor. Notably, each region repeated its 2021 vote: Sánchez held the districts that had voted for Castillo, and Fujimori kept hers. Although Sánchez improved on Castillo’s results among Lima’s middle classes, he did not achieve the same level of support in the Castillista stronghold of the southern highlands, where Fujimori gained ground. Sánchez prevailed by a narrow margin within the national territory, but Fujimori’s advantage among overseas voters reversed the result.
Why?
It is worth pausing on Keiko Fujimori, beyond the surname. Unlike much of the leadership of Latin America’s new right, the leader of Fuerza Popular is far from an outsider. She is, on the contrary, one of Peru’s most professional politicians. She entered Congress in 2006 and, since then, has built something her father always rejected: a party. Fuerza Popular, which she has chaired since 2010, became under her leadership Peru’s main political organization. But her leadership is not that of the charismatic caudillo: she runs her parliamentary bloc from the shadows, appears rarely, and approaches the public mainly during campaigns.
Her figure also drags along a long judicial battle — three spells in pretrial detention for alleged money laundering in the Odebrecht case — although the central charge was annulled in 2025 by the Constitutional Court, whose members were appointed by a Congress under strong Fujimorist influence. The vote for her combines a nostalgia for the order and economic growth of the 1990s — those of her father’s dictatorial government — with support for her as an heir capable of administering his legacy.
To understand anti-Fujimorism’s first defeat since 2000, one must consider both external and internal factors. In the first round, Keiko Fujimori stood out by consolidating a clear and effective message — “Order returns” — in a context where the fight against crime has become the main public demand and figures like Nayib Bukele are highly esteemed. Her message appealed openly to the memory of Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarian government. She explicitly said, “I want to govern like my father,” and offered faceless judges and withdrawal from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights to fight crime with an “iron fist.” She asserted this discourse without moderation and articulated it effectively in the debates, where she has more experience than any other candidate.
All of this helps explain why, despite the high share of votes against her, Fujimori improved her first-round performance: in 2021 she obtained only 13%; now she reached 17%, around 700,000 more votes, mainly in Lima and on the northern and central coast. In part, this is explained by the weakness of her competitors on the right. López Aliaga, her main rival in that space, combined outlandish security proposals — such as jungle prisons guarded by snakes — with a Lima-centric “culture war” that does not connect with the national demand for order. Fujimori capitalized on that vacuum with a more credible and disciplined message.
For the runoff, however, she did little. While she travelled through areas that had historically eluded her, Fujimori made no attempt to reach the moderate voter. Nor did she seek the televised blessing of conservative pastors, as in past elections. Moreover, her performance in the debate with Sánchez was lack-luster. For the first time, she faced an opponent quick with his answers and with better communication skills, one who left her noticeably uncomfortable. All of this seemed to stall her polling numbers in the final week before the election.
On the side of the main national media, based in Lima, the systematic bias in Fujimori’s favor was repeated. They hammered the idea of the “greater evil” that Sánchez represented, highlighting his vindication of the government and attempted self-coup of Pedro Castillo — whom he promised to pardon — his alliance with radical actors, and his promise of a Constituent Assembly, which threatened to change the economic model. The impact of this last point could explain a finding by the economist Alejandro Palomino: the cities of the interior, where pre-pandemic economic levels have still not recovered — and where, for that very reason, the fear of a further disruption of the model runs deeper — had voted for Castillo, but no longer to the same extent for Sánchez. By contrast, rural areas that recovered or improved, where that fear did not operate, maintained their Castillista vote.
Turning to the internal factors, the central issue is the tensions within the old anti-Fujimorist coalition. What is surprising is that this run-off finally managed to bring together sectors that, barely two years earlier, had been unable to march together against Dina Boluarte. Anti-Fujimorism had been accumulating tensions since 2016 and collapsed during Castillo’s government: the radical left accused the moderate left of betrayal, the latter accused the former of being authoritarian and corrupt, and the centre-right accused both of covering for the erosion of democracy and the state. Those distances made it impossible to articulate a common response during the social upheaval of 2022–2023 and persisted in the following years. How, then, did Sánchez — who had just brought together the radical left — manage to add the moderate left and part of the centre? The answer lies in who Sánchez is and in how he moved his candidacy between the two rounds.
Sánchez is not an outsider, but a cadre of the institutional left who rose to national prominence as Castillo’s most stable minister. His trajectory is ambivalent: he condemned the self-coup, but abstained in the impeachment vote, and although he did not join the authoritarian coalition in Congress, he voted with it on specific measures, such as those that shielded illegal mining. For 2026, he mounted the Castillista movement — he took up Castillo’s hat, offered to pardon him — and radicalised his platform with an “Andean-Amazonian socialism” and the incorporation of Antauro Humala, a former ethnonationalist soldier who spent nearly 20 years in prison for an armed uprising.
That radicalism allowed him to defeat the moderate left and reach the runoff with 12% of the vote, but it became his main burden for the second round, above all because his lists included radical union figures and some people flagged — which they deny — for links with the Movement for Amnesty and Fundamental Rights (Movadef), the political arm that championed Shining Path, judicially banned in 2024. Aware of the problem, Sánchez distanced himself from Humala, gave way on almost all his economic proposals, and put together a new plan in agreement with the moderate-left and centre parties. Influential figures who had previously promoted the spoiled (null) ballot then shifted to supporting Sánchez as the lesser evil against Fujimori. That helps explain his improvement over Castillo’s vote in middle-class Lima. But it was not enough to convince the entire old coalition.
But no matter how much he moved to the center, Sánchez was still seen as a radical candidacy and as the possible repeat of Castillo’s chaotic government. Thus, besides his aforementioned drop in votes in the Castillista areas, he also alienated centre-right sectors that, since Castillo, distrust their old left-wing partners. That distrust was embodied by Jorge Nieto, a centrist politician with anti-Fujimorist credentials who nonetheless refused to back an anti-Fujimorism stretched to include figures like Antauro Humala. In the final days he reaffirmed his spoiled ballot, which unleashed attacks from Sánchez’s camp and reopened old wounds. Given the narrow margin that determined Fujimori’s victory, events like this may have influenced the final result.
This election showed that anti-Fujimorism was not dead, but was indeed weakened by the tensions running through it. It has been argued that part of the explanation for the results is that Peruvians shifted rightward over this five-year period, or decided to vote against the ruling establishment. But who is the ruling establishment? There are polls that record greater self-identification with the right. However, what we have is a picture almost identical to that of 2021, with a small variation, explained more by the limitations of the left-wing bloc. Part of this also has to do with the fact that Sánchez wore Castillo’s hat, but is not Castillo: he could never replicate the enthusiasm the former president aroused in interior cities and rural areas. As for the protest vote, the category becomes slippery: in 2021 Castillo won, but since 2022 a congressional coalition diametrically opposed to the left has governed, one in which Fujimorism has played a leading role. Would the protest vote be against the left or against the right?
What prevailed in the polls was an anti-establishment mood, against the chaos of the last five years. However, the opposition’s inability to build bridges among its own ranks dispersed the vote, which made it easier for two small extremes to reach the runoff. In Peru there are social cleavages that have ordered the geography of the vote for decades, despite the collapse of the party system; but this division into two exactly equal parts — which triggers the activation of the worst classism, racism, and Lima-centric, anti-provincial centralism — is the product of an offer of two options that appear threatening to the majority of voters.
What to expect?
What kind of right does Fujimorism embody? The Peruvian case forces us to qualify the usual categories. Fujimori has been read as a conventional right, less radical than López Aliaga’s, which fits better the mold of the radical populist right: authoritarian, illiberal, xenophobic, and a driver of the “culture war.” But that reading underestimates the dangers Fujimorism poses to democracy. Fuerza Popular is not xenophobic, and its populism is intermittent: it inherited from the Fujimorism of the 1990s an anti-establishment repertoire that it deploys when in opposition but sidelines now that it co-directs power in Congress. What it consistently is, however, is authoritarian: punitivist, a vindicator of Alberto Fujimori’s government, and a leading player in the erosion of checks and balances over the past decade. Peru thus reveals something that typologies placing too much emphasis on the anti-system outsider tend to overlook: that authoritarianism does not arrive only from the populist margins, but also from professional politicians who claim to defend the established order. In Peru, moreover, that erosion came not from the executive but from Congress.
Since 2022, Peru was already governed by an authoritarian coalition in which Fujimorism played a leading role; the 2026 elections give that leadership the legitimacy of the ballot box. The new Congress is, moreover, bicameral: despite a 2018 referendum having rejected bicameralism, the outgoing Congress itself reinstated it and designed a Senate with disproportionate powers — it has the final word on laws, can amend them by simple majority, and is shielded from the presidential dissolution that does hang over the Chamber of Deputies. Fujimori will not have a majority of her own in either chamber, but given her decade of negotiating experience and the bridges she nonetheless maintained with López Aliaga’s Renovación Popular, it is feasible that she will build the coalition she needs: to keep her allies in the institutions that might exercise oversight, to advance her reform of the judicial system, and to block any initiative contrary to her interests.
The president-elect also has the backing of the business associations and of Armed Forces and a Police benefiting from her guarantees of impunity for human rights violations, past and future. If she governs with low popularity and is shaken by social protests, her record suggests she will resort to repression as her main tool of governance, with the support of the main media. Fujimorism is, ultimately, the most organized threat to democracy in the country and the one with the most powerful allies.
The opposition, by contrast, remains divided. Between 2022 and 2026, this division limited its capacity to resist the ruling authoritarian coalition, despite the enormous unpopularity of both the executive and Congress, and despite the demand for early elections holding above 70% until 2024. But while the institutional arena has narrowed further, the opposition can still veto constitutional reforms and organize to influence key appointments — the Constitutional Court or the Ombudsman — that require two-thirds of the Senate.
The very aftermath of the election threatens to deepen the fracture. Sánchez has not recognised Fujimori’s victory: he alleges irregularities in the processing of the overseas votes — decisive in the result — and announces a “popular resistance” if the electoral authority does not annul them. The claim has little foundation, for even if there were administrative failures, there is no evidence of any alteration of the count, and the overseas result, where Fujimori exceeded 60% of the vote, merely repeats the historical behaviour of that electorate, which already backed her by a wide margin in the first round. His challenge, like López Aliaga’s “civil insurgency” before it, delegitimises the result without proving it. And it once again strains the coalition: the moderate left and the centre-right will hardly endorse a fraud accusation that would draw them toward the anti-system camp from which they seek to distance themselves. Anti-Fujimorism, barely reunited for the runoff, runs the risk of shattering just when it most needs to act as a bloc.
Whether the opposition can use the tools it still retains depends, then, on achieving what it failed to achieve against Boluarte: voting in a coordinated way in Congress and coordinating broad platforms in civil society, sustained by a persistent but non-violent mobilisation that does not hand the government the repressive pretext it seeks. That demands difficult openings — above all, that each bloc renounce vetoing the other and rediscover the common minimum that once united this coalition: the defence of human rights against authoritarianism.
If it fails, the second Fujimori regime will confirm a lesson that goes beyond Peru: that when representation is hollowed out and institutions are captured, an organised minority is enough to inherit power, and a fragmented opposition enough to hand it over.
Omar Coronel holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame (Indiana, USA). He currently teaches in the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), where he also coordinates the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Social Conflicts and Inequalities (GICO).
The Spanish original of this article first appeared in Nueva Sociedad. This English translation first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog.
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