Peruvians went to the polls on Sunday for a presidential election that would install the country’s tenth president in roughly a decade, a statistic that says more about Peruvian institutional fragility than any single candidate. The race is tight and polarised between Keiko Fujimori, the three-time presidential candidate and daughter of imprisoned former president Alberto Fujimori, running on a hard-right anti-crime and economic-nationalism platform, and Roberto Sánchez, the leftist candidate backed by constituencies that mobilised to oppose Fujimori in previous runoffs. The election takes place against a backdrop of elite political instability — Peru has cycled through presidents via impeachment, resignation, and congressional removal at a rate that would be extraordinary anywhere else — combined with persistent criminal violence, economic inequality, and weakening democratic norms. A Guardian longform profile characterises Keiko Fujimori’s rise as part of a broader regional pattern of hard-right political forces capitalising on institutional failure.
The received wisdom
The liberal consensus on Peruvian politics is coherent and not without justification. Keiko Fujimori is the daughter of a man convicted of crimes against humanity during his presidency in the 1990s, including the forced sterilisation programme that affected hundreds of thousands of indigenous and rural women. She herself has faced corruption charges related to campaign financing from the Odebrecht construction scandal, charges that her supporters characterise as political persecution but that proceeded through Peruvian courts. The “Fujimorismo” political movement has consistently positioned itself as willing to bend institutional norms in service of executive authority — a tradition of “effective governance” that, to critics, is simply authoritarianism with a popular mandate. The fear among democratic-norms advocates is that a Keiko Fujimori presidency would follow the playbook of other regional hard-right leaders — Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil — in deploying popular security mandates to concentrate executive power and weaken independent institutions.
A different read
The critique of Fujimorismo is largely accurate as far as it goes. The problem is that it tends to skip over the question of what the alternative has actually produced.
Peru’s democratic institutions have not, on the evidence of the past decade, demonstrated the capacity to deliver stable governance. Ten presidents in roughly ten years — some removed by constitutional mechanisms that were deployed in ways that strained their original intent, others leaving under corruption clouds — represents a form of institutional failure that is distinct from the Fujimorista threat but no less real. The Peruvian Congress, which has been the primary mechanism of presidential removal, has approval ratings that rival those of the executives it has ousted. Peruvian voters have reasonable grounds for concluding that the formal democratic machinery is not serving them.
This is the structural condition that makes hard-right populism legible in Peru, as in much of Latin America. When institutions are simultaneously corrupt, ineffective, and used by competing elite factions as weapons against one another, the credibility of institutional-norms arguments is genuinely diminished. Telling Peruvian voters to trust the same congress that has removed multiple presidents — often for politically motivated reasons as much as legal ones — while criminal violence continues to worsen is an argument that requires quite a lot of faith in institutions that have not earned it.
Keiko Fujimori’s father is a complicated figure for Peruvians, not simply a villain. Alberto Fujimori’s 1990s administration was credited by significant portions of the population with defeating the Shining Path insurgency and stabilising an economy that had been destroyed by hyperinflation under his predecessor. Those achievements do not excuse the human rights abuses that followed, and Peruvian courts have appropriately adjudicated them. But the political resonance of Fujimorismo is not simply manufactured nostalgia; it reflects a genuine historical memory that leftist and liberal critics tend to dismiss rather than engage.
Roberto Sánchez represents a coalition that includes trade unions, indigenous movements, and progressive civil society. If he wins, the question will be whether he can build a governing coalition stable enough to survive the congressional dynamics that have destroyed every other recent Peruvian president. The left’s track record in Peru — the Castillo presidency ended in his own failed self-coup attempt and subsequent imprisonment — does not inspire confidence in institutional durability on that side either.
The real story here is not which populism prevails. It is whether Peru can build any form of political arrangement that lasts longer than a single presidential term. That requires institutional reform — above all, changes to the constitutional mechanism that allows congressional impeachment for “moral incapacity,” a provision that has been weaponised with reckless frequency. Neither Fujimori nor Sánchez has made constitutional stabilisation the centrepiece of their campaign, which suggests that whoever wins will inhabit the same dysfunctional system that destroyed their predecessors.
What to watch
- Whether either candidate achieves a clear first-round majority, or whether a runoff produces the polarising dynamic that has defined previous Fujimori contests
- Congressional composition: the identity of the next Peruvian president matters less than whether Congress will be willing to work with, rather than against, whoever is elected
- The regional signal: a Fujimori victory would encourage regional hard-right movements; a Sánchez victory would be read in Venezuela and Cuba as validation of a progressive regional bloc that may or may not exist
- International investment flows: Peru is a major copper producer and critical minerals player; investor sentiment will be watched by markets anxious about resource-nationalism on either side of the political spectrum
— J