The right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori once again placed herself ahead of the left-wing candidate Roberto Sánchez tonight when 98.20% of the count was reached in the second round of the presidential elections in Peru, held last Sunday.
In the absence of counting less than 2% of the votes, Fujimori obtains 50.001% of the valid votes by receiving 9,032,189 votes, compared to 49.999% for Sánchez, who totals 9,031,723 votes, which leaves the daughter and political heir of former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) on track to be the new president of Peru for a very narrow margin.
On Monday, the Together for Peru candidate had taken the lead and managed to achieve an advantage of up to 42,000 votes, but the Fuerza Popular candidate has managed to reverse that difference thanks to the vote from abroad, where she has the most votes.
The daughter and political heir of former President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) can, in this way, achieve the objective that she had pursued in the last three elections where she had been defeated in the second round (2011, 2016 and 2021) and that she aims to achieve in her fourth presidential candidacy.
The votes that remain to be counted belong to those cast abroad and contested minutes, the majority from the capital Lima, where in both cases the right-wing party has the most votes, which could predictably give it victory by a few thousand votes over its rival, who competed on behalf of the imprisoned former president Pedro Castillo (2021-2022).
This is the third consecutive election in Peru that will be decided by a slim margin of a few tens of thousands of votes, after Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Pedro Castillo defeated Keiko Fujimori by just 40,000 votes in 2016 and 2021, respectively.
Roberto Sánchez, candidate of the Together for Peru party, on the election night of June 7, 2026 in Lima (Peru).
What can it mean?
Fujimori’s probable victory on this occasion would mean the return of Fujimorism to the government of Peru after 26 years of his father’s resignation by fax from Japan, after a decade in which he established himself in power with a self-coup in 1992 and which ended in the middle of a gigantic corruption scandal.
The candidate carried out a campaign of total vindication of the legacy of Alberto Fujimori by promising to govern like him, who laid the foundations of economic and commercial stability that allowed the growth of the country in the last three decades, while defeating the subversive groups Sendero Luminoso and Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA).
More than 27.3 million Peruvians were called to the polls on Sunday to choose between Fujimori and Sánchez for the option that will have the right to govern the country for the next five years (2026-2031), after a decade of political instability having had eight presidents, due to a succession of presidential dismissals promoted by Parliament.
