Keiko Fujimori, the conservative candidate and daughter of the late autocratic president Alberto Fujimori, has won Peru’s presidential runoff by fewer than 50,000 votes out of more than 18 million ballots cast — her fourth attempt at the presidency and the narrowest of her victories. The official result is due on July 3; Fujimori takes office on July 28 for a five-year term. Her opponent, the left-wing Roberto Sanchez, has disputed the count, alleging administrative irregularities in the handling of overseas votes, and has said he will not recognise a Fujimori government. The election was fought principally on rising crime — extortion gangs, contract killings, and the chronic impunity that has plagued Peru for years — with Fujimori promising what she called a “strong hand” approach. Peru has had eight presidents in a decade; the question now is whether the ninth will be able to govern.
The received wisdom
The progressive reading of Fujimori’s victory is one of dread and foreboding. Keiko is the political heir to a man who crushed the Maoist Shining Path insurgency through methods that included death squads, forced sterilisations, and systematic corruption — and who ended his life jailed for crimes against humanity before dying in 2023. Her own record in the legislature, where her party Fuerza Popular has repeatedly blocked reformist governments and struck opportunistic alliances to accumulate institutional leverage, does not inspire confidence in her democratic instincts. The Guardian’s framing — Peru’s result as the “latest victory for the Latin American right” — is accurate as far as it goes: from Colombia’s Espriella to Argentina’s Milei to Peru’s Fujimori, the region is in the grip of a conservative wave whose driving force is revulsion at insecurity, corruption, and economic stagnation under left-wing governments. The concern is that these new governments, arriving on mandates for a “strong hand,” will exercise that hand against political opponents and institutions rather than against organised crime.
A different read
Peru’s political crisis does not begin and end with Fujimori, and understanding it requires sitting with what her opponent represented. Roberto Sanchez’s left-wing coalition included elements directly connected to the governance disasters of the Castillo years — President Pedro Castillo, who was removed and jailed in 2022 for attempting an autogolpe, had pursued economic policies that spooked investors and institutional reforms that frightened the courts. The left-wing programme Sanchez represented had no credible answer to Peru’s crime epidemic, which is not an abstract political complaint but a daily reality for millions of Peruvians, particularly in Lima’s peripheral districts and in the extractive regions where criminal organisations have effectively displaced state authority.
Keiko’s four-run effort is itself a story worth examining. She lost in 2011, 2016, and 2021 — the last time by fewer than 45,000 votes — and has spent years battling corruption charges of her own, including allegations related to campaign finance from the Odebrecht scandal. The Guardian’s account notes that she worked to soften her image during this campaign, and the narrow margin suggests she succeeded in reaching voters who had previously been put off by her combativeness. Whether that softening reflects genuine moderation or tactical repositioning is the question that will determine whether her presidency looks more like Chile’s Piñera — pragmatic, institutionalist, economically coherent — or more like her father’s darker moments.
The parallel with Colombia is instructive. Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella also ran on crime and order and won narrowly with disputed legitimacy questions, and he too is facing institutional headwinds from a congress and judiciary not aligned with his agenda. The pattern across the Latin American right is a legitimacy gap: these governments win elections but cannot build durable governing coalitions because their mandates are rooted more in rejection of the left than in affirmative institutional loyalty. Fujimori will govern with Fuerza Popular in the legislature, which gives her more structural support than many recent presidents — but the party’s record of legislative adventurism suggests that structural support can become structural capture if she is not careful.
There is also the crime question itself, which her mandate requires her to address. Peru’s security situation has deteriorated badly: extortion networks operating out of prisons, contract killings rising in cities that were once considered safe, and a coastal cocaine corridor that funnels product to Europe through Peruvian ports. “Strong hand” policing has a mixed record in Latin America — El Salvador’s Bukele achieved genuine crime reductions through mass incarceration, but the civil liberties costs have been severe and the durability of the gains is unproven. Peru’s institutions are weaker than El Salvador’s were in 2019, which makes a copy-paste of the Bukele model both more tempting and more dangerous.
What to watch
Watch whether Sanchez’s challenge of the result gains legal traction — Peru’s National Elections Jury has a history of intervening in disputed counts, and even a brief legitimacy cloud over Fujimori’s inauguration will constrain her governing authority. Watch her first cabinet appointments: if she assembles a technocratic economic team rather than party loyalists, the markets will breathe easier and the institutional risk recedes. Watch her relationship with the judiciary, which has been Peru’s last institutional check against executive overreach for two decades; if her government moves to pack or intimidate the courts in the manner her father did in the 1990s, the international pressure will mount quickly. And watch whether the crime statistics actually move — the mandate she received is specific, measurable, and time-limited.
— J