It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to describe the first round of voting for Peru’s presidency on 12 April as an unpopularity contest. In a crowded field of 35 candidates, 23 scored less than 1 per cent, and only five got more than 10 per cent. Abstentions reached 26 per cent, not unprecedented but high for a country with compulsory voting. Keiko Fujimori, daughter of authoritarian former president Alberto Fujimori, finished first with 17 per cent of the vote, but it took over a month to determine who will face her in the run-off on 7 June. In the end a razor-thin margin of 21,209 votes separated the second- and third-placed candidates: Roberto Sánchez of the leftist Juntos por el Perú coalition won 12 per cent, ahead of Rafael López Aliaga, the far-right former mayor of Lima, on 11.9 per cent. A tenth of a percentage point was all that spared Peru the grim scenario of a run-off between two versions of the authoritarian right. As it stands, the June election will be a contest between Fujimori’s heir and a left seeking to rally opposition to his legacy.

Polls currently show Fujimori ahead of Sánchez by 39 per cent to 35, but with 14 per cent of voters saying they will cast a blank vote and another 12 per cent undecided, the race could yet tilt decisively either way. The first-round results to some extent replicated the regional rifts that marked the previous contest between Fujimori and Pedro Castillo in 2021. In that election, Castillo carried much of the country’s interior while Fujimori won along the coast. Castillo’s margin of victory was less than 45,000 votes, and his presidency was all but crippled from the outset by resistance from congress, which removed him in late 2022 after he had attempted to dissolve the legislature to break the impasse. Replaced by his vice president, Dina Boluarte, he was jailed in 2025 and remains in prison.

This time around, Fujimori once again did best in coastal areas, from Tumbes and Piura down to Ica, while Sánchez comfortably carried the highland departments: Huancavelica, Ayacucho, Apurímac, Cusco, Puno. These areas tend to be poorer and more indigenous; Fujimori did worst here, posting single-digit scores. Aside from two regional anomalies – fourth-placed candidate Jorge Nieto won his native department of Arequipa, and Ricardo Belmont, a former mayor of Lima, won Tacna – the big exception to the binary geographical pattern was Lima, where López Aliaga came first with 19.9 per cent. Home to around a third of the total electorate, the department of Lima, which includes the capital, has historically leaned to the right, and will surely be a major vote bank for Fujimori in the second round: she finished narrowly behind López Aliaga on 17.9 per cent in the first round, while Sánchez placed ninth with a miserable 3.3 per cent.

Much of the drama in the weeks following the first round hinged on López Aliaga’s response to the results. While the initial returns favoured him, as soon as Sánchez overtook him in the count López Aliaga and his supporters cried fraud and sought to have the results annulled. They focused in particular on returns from rural areas, denying their validity in a barely veiled demonstration of class disdain and racism. López Aliaga’s campaign offered cash rewards to anyone reporting electoral irregularities (which was itself, of course, a violation of electoral law). On 2 April, ten days before the first round, López Aliaga had made a thinly veiled death threat against Piero Corvetto, head of the country’s electoral authority; the day after the vote, on 13 April, López Aliaga publicly threatened to sodomize Roberto Burneo, president of Peru’s electoral tribunal. The far right kept up its vitriolic attacks against the electoral authorities in the media while the votes were being counted; Corvetto eventually resigned on 21 April. A month after the vote López Aliaga’s supporters were threatening an uprising if the results were not overturned, and he himself declared that an ‘electoral coup’ was in progress. But when the final counts were announced on 14 May, López Aliaga’s party effectively capitulated – still crying foul play, but claiming it had ‘exhausted all remedies’.

Having come so close, López Aliaga may extract a high price for acting as queenmaker to Fujimori. Widely known as ‘Porky’ for his porcine features, López Aliaga (b. 1961) entered politics in the 2000s, having made his fortune in banking and the hotel business. He is in some ways a typical figure of Latin America’s new right, riding a wave of conservative Christian faux outrage and anti-leftist, anti-‘gender ideology’ sentiment to the mayoralty of Lima in 2023 at the head of Renovación Popular, a new party founded in 2020. But in other respects, as Peruvian historian Cecilia Méndez has observed, López Aliaga represents the oldest of right-wing forces, drawing on a deep well of elite tradition in which arbitrary power and violence – including sexual violence – are readily deployed in defence of entrenched privilege. It’s worth noting, though, that López Aliaga’s 11.9 per cent score only minimally improved on his 11.8 per cent in 2021, when he also came third – hardly the sign of an inexorable forward march of the far right. López Aliaga’s support base outside Lima is also negligible, and Fujimori may calculate that his supporters will be only too happy to back her against a leftist.

Sánchez’s success was perhaps the major surprise of the first round: his eventual tally more than doubled the 4–6 per cent polls had predicted. Born in 1969 in in Huaral, a city about two hours’ drive up the coast from Lima, Sánchez trained as a social psychologist before entering politics as part of the now-defunct Partido Humanista Peruano, one of four parties that merged to form the Juntos por el Perú coalition in 2017. President of the coalition since then, Sánchez was elected to congress in 2021 and then appointed minister of trade and tourism in Castillo’s short-lived administration, before resigning in the wake of the president’s failed attempt to dissolve congress in 2022. Sánchez’s platform calls for a ‘re-foundation of the country’, based on a ‘new social contract, a plurinational state that recognizes the true face of Peru’. As well as advocating for a new constitution, Juntos por el Perú proposed other measures likely to appeal to voters from the interior: decentralization of power from the capital to department-level governments; revision of mining contracts, with a view to keeping more revenue close to sites of extraction; and moves to rebalance the country’s agriculture away from exports. Other potentially popular policies included commitments to tackle the scourge of for-profit universities and expand access to higher education, as well as abrogating several laws passed by congress since 2023 that make it more difficult to prosecute organized crime.

On the campaign trail Sánchez underscored his connection to Castillo, wearing the same wide-brimmed white hat and promising to secure the deposed president’s release from jail. This was part of an attempt to reach voters who in 2021, suspicious of all established parties, had rallied to Castillo’s party, the tiny and marginal Perú Libre, rather than Juntos por el Perú. Sánchez doesn’t have Castillo’s outsider status, and he was not able to replicate the latter’s 2021 tally. But he improved on the 8 per cent garnered by Juntos por el Perú’s previous candidate, Verónika Mendoza, suggesting that, at least in the highland interior, he was indeed able to draw in some of Castillo’s voters. The former president remains popular even though support for his party, Perú Libre, has all but vanished – in large part thanks to its incompetence and brazenly opportunistic conduct, both before and after his removal. In this election, Perú Libre’s candidate was longstanding party leader Vladimir Cerrón, who has been on the run from Peruvian authorities since 2023, fleeing corruption charges; he won barely 100,000 votes nationwide (0.6 per cent).

Fujimori, for her part, did slightly better than in 2021, improving her first-round score from 13 per cent to 17. But given the fragmentation of the field, she might have hoped to pick up more of the pieces from her opponents, and the result, together with its marked regional distribution, suggests she still has relatively limited reach beyond a hard core of fujimoristas. She has catered to that constituency by echoing her father’s approach to security, vowing to wage ‘frontal war’ on crime. But beyond that, her hope will be that hostility to the left and short memories – a quarter of the electorate is under 30, too young to remember her father’s decade-long rule (1990–2000) – will be enough to secure her the presidency at the fourth attempt. To some extent, the 7 June run-off is a question of which aversion turns out to be more powerful, anti-Fujimori or anti-Castillo sentiment. Both are strong: polls in late April showed 48 per cent of respondents would ‘definitely not’ vote for Fujimori, while 43 per cent were set against Sánchez.

Yet the political terrain in Peru is murkier and more fragmented than such polarization implies. The first round’s lengthy roster of presidential candidates was only one symptom of a profound and enduring political crisis. Its most visible sign has been the serial ejection of the country’s presidents: since 2018, four have been removed by impeachment or censure votes and two have resigned under imminent threat of the same. Another, related symptom has been the abysmal unpopularity of both these ephemeral presidents and the congress that has removed and installed them like so much second-hand office furniture. For much of her tenure Boluarte, who assumed the presidency after Castillo’s ouster in December 2022, was the world’s least popular head of state; by the end – she somehow lasted until October 2025 before being impeached, too – she was polling in the low single digits. Whoever wins on 7 June will be Peru’s ninth president in the space of a decade, taking charge of an executive branch that has been steadily drained of authority and power. 

First-round voting for the presidency coincided with elections to the Chamber of Deputies and a new Senate. The return to bicameralism was the result of a constitutional reform the Peruvian congress passed in 2024, which provided for a Senate for the first time since Alberto Fujimori rewrote the constitution to abolish it in 1993. In theory, one might imagine that an increase in the number of elected posts signifies an increase in democratic power. But tellingly, the Peruvian public were overwhelmingly opposed: in a 2018 referendum, 91 per cent voted against a return to bicameralism and 86 per cent voted to bar deputies from re-election. While the latter measure was implemented in 2021, congress’s 2024 reform overturned both of these verdicts, as well as enabling the current levy of deputies to be elected to the new Senate. More than a constitutional rebalancing, the return to bicameralism is widely seen as a move by the existing political class to expand their own opportunities for graft. 

The bewildering spread of candidacies and the mix of electoral systems – the 130 Chamber deputies are elected to regional multimember constituencies through proportional representation; half the Senate’s 60 deputies are elected through a nationwide PR list and half to regional constituencies through PR – made for a ballot paper that was half a metre long. The arithmetic is complex, but the outcomes for both the incoming Chamber of Deputies and the Senate seemed largely to mirror the pattern of presidential voting. Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular was on track to secure 22 Senate seats and 39 deputies; Juntos por el Perú was in second place with 14 senators and 31 deputies; López Aliaga’s Renovación Popular was third in voting for the Senate, with 8 seats, but was pushed into fourth place in the Chamber by Nieto’s Partido del Buen Gobierno, which will have 18 deputies to RP’s 16. The biggest winners were Juntos por el Perú, which will gain 26 deputies, and Fuerza Popular, which will gain 15. The biggest loser was Perú Libre, which went from being the largest party with 37 deputies in 2021 to being wiped out altogether this time. No party is close to a majority in either chamber, and the eventual winner of the presidency will likely have to engage in constant horse-trading to implement anything resembling a policy agenda.

A major factor in the opacity of Peruvian politics for outside observers is that party labels tend to hold only provisional meaning at best. Politicians with a long trajectory under the banners of a single political organization are very much the exception; more common are ‘transfugas’, deserters, who switch affiliations with every election cycle. Increasingly common, too, are total novices: according to Steven Levitsky and Mauricio Zavaleta, more than 90 per cent of the deputies elected in 2021 were serving in congress for the first time, and 80 per cent had no previous experience of elected office of any kind. It’s not hard to see how such trends might go hand-in-hand with a surge of opportunism and short-term profit-seeking – which, of course, encourages disenchantment with existing parties, and leads to voters plumping for a new batch of ‘outsider’ candidates, who in turn disappoint, leading to a new round of fragmentation.

These dynamics are part of a longer-term process that political scientists Rodrigo Barrenechea and Alberto Vergara call ‘democratic hollowing’. They argue that, whereas in many countries an excessive concentration of power paves the way towards authoritarianism, in Peru it is the dilution of power that is doing so. This has taken place through two intertwined developments. First, the shift in power away from the executive and towards the legislature. This has become accentuated in the last few years, but as political scientist Omar Coronel argues, it began with Keiko Fujimori’s defeat in the 2016 presidential election, in the aftermath of which she reputedly vowed that ‘we will govern from the congress’. What began as parliamentary obstructionism turned into a project for remaking the constitution by stealth, as Fujimori’s party took the lead in asserting congressional power at the expense of the executive. Article 113 of Peru’s constitution enables the congress to remove a president for ‘permanent moral or physical incapacity’; the wording leaves room for interpretation, and over the past decade, Peru’s congress has turned that into a yawning chasm into which presidents can be overthrown at will.

At the same time, Peru has experienced a collapse of its party system, such that it has long been known as a ‘democracy without parties’. This second development dates to the 1980s, to the twinned emergencies of a dizzying economic crisis and the conflict between the armed forces and the Shining Path guerillas. If left parties were in large measure undone by the crushing of livelihoods and by the virulent counter-insurgency of the 1990s, parties on the right were unmade not only by Alberto Fujimori’s authoritarianism but also by his preference for ad hoc, personalist structures (he created a new party for each election he contested). In that sense, as Levitsky and Zavaleta observe, Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular – created in 2010 to unify various abandoned fujimorista vehicles, and still around sixteen years later – is an ironic exception to the broader pattern that emerged under her father.

This prolonged fragmentation has not been remedied in the 21st century. If anything, it has accelerated, with parties lacking any organic connection to voters, let alone members, rotating in and out of congress according to often minor swings of mood or preference in the electorate. Levitsky and Zavaleta call it ‘lottery-ization’, but it’s far from random: once mass membership and solid organizing work are not on the menu, what wins elections is resources, whether in the form of media ownership or cash to pay for PR campaigns and airtime. Illicit sources of finance are also clearly part of the picture, with organized crime, for-profit universities, and informal mining and logging interests seeking footholds in the political sphere.

These features are, of course, far from unique to Peru: they are pervasive in democratic polities across much of the world. As Peter Mair argued more than a decade ago in Ruling the Void (2013), declines in political participation and party identification have marched in lockstep with an increasing severance of political elites from electorates. From this perspective, Peru seems less an anomaly and more a preview of what lies ahead for the rest of us. In the meantime, it will require much more than a win for Sánchez on 7 June for Peru to break out of this spiral of fragmentation and disenchantment. But a pause in the Fujimori-orchestrated business-as-usual might at least provide a respite in which to begin to imagine paths out of the morass.

 Read on: Tony Wood, ‘Latin America Tamed’, NLR 58.