Peru will once again repeat the script of the last two elections by entering into a vote-by-vote vote to meet its next president, a wait that can last for days and weeks after projections show a technical tie that gives a minimal advantage to the leftist Roberto Sánchez over the rightist Keiko Fujimori.
The next president of Peru will once again be decided by a few thousand votes, as happened in 2016 and 2021, when the election was defined by just 40,000 votes, which gave victory to Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Pedro Castillo over Fujimori, who could have a fourth consecutive defeat in the second round.
The sample prepared by the Ipsos company for the Transparencia Civil Association awarded 50.3% to Sánchez, against 49.7% to Fujimori, while another projection with official minutes from the private company Datum Internacional indicated that Sánchez received 50.14% and Fujimori 49.86%.
The results of these projections, which have a margin of error of 1.9% and 1%, respectively, confirm that the election between Fujimori and Sánchez will be resolved very closely, similar to the two previous elections. Final results may take a month.
Upon learning of these results, Sánchez went out to a balcony in the emblematic Plaza San Martín, in the historic center of Lima, to assure his followers that “this is the day of the recovery of democracy” and considered that it is “the moment to defend the vote”, for which he asked his delegates to “demand respect for the electoral result and the will of the people.”
The candidate gave his message without taking off the hat of the imprisoned former president Castillo, whom he represents in these elections and who has promised to free him from his sentence for the failed coup d’état of 2022, since he vindicates it by considering that the political and economic elites, with Fujimori at the head, prevented him from governing.
In turn, Fujimori offered a brief statement to the press to show caution and accept the “technical tie” shown by the projections, while anticipating that he will accept the electoral results, unlike in 2021, when he denounced, without solid evidence, an alleged fraud against him and sought with various resources to reverse the results.
“So far there is no winner in this contest, for this reason, it will be long days until we find out,” said the leader of the Fujimori Popular Force party.
Furthermore, the daughter and political heir of former President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), whose legacy she fully vindicated in this electoral campaign, reiterated that the work of the delegates of her party, which in her words reaches 95,000 people, is “doubly important” since they must count the minutes one by one to respect the “popular will.”
An advantage that will be reduced
With 62% of the official count, Keiko Fujimori appears almost five points ahead, receiving 52.67% of the valid votes compared to 47.32% for Sánchez, which translates into 6,410,410 votes for the right-wing party and 5,758,742 for the left-wing party.
In Peru, the counting system begins to process votes from the capital Lima and other cities first, where Fujimori is the most voted candidate, while the last to be counted are the votes from rural areas, where Sánchez concentrates the majority of his support.
This predictably means that the gap between both candidates will narrow as the scrutiny of a day that passed normally and without major incidents progresses.
More than 27.3 million Peruvians were called to the polls to choose the option that will govern the country in the next five years, after a decade of political instability where there have been eight presidents.
