Over two weeks after Peruvians voted, the official presidential runoff count is still being finalised, with special electoral juries working, page by page, through some 1,500 tally sheets flagged for irregularities. However, with 99.86 per cent of the count verified, right-winger Keiko Fujimori’s lead is irreversible.

This was Fujimori’s fourth consecutive runoff, after losses in 2011, 2016 and 2021. It was defeated candidate Roberto Sánchez’s first time. Fujimori is the daughter of former authoritarian president Alberto Fujimori, while Sánchez is a close ally of previous leftist president Pedro Castillo, who’s currently in prison for attempting to illegally dissolve Congress. He led in the early counting of domestic ballots but Fujimori overtook him as votes from abroad, historically favourable to the right, were tallied.

Both campaigns alleged irregularities and filed claims, which electoral authorities mostly rejected. Fujimori’s Popular Force (Fuerza Popular) sought annulment of thousands of rural votes in Puno, a Sánchez stronghold in the southern Andes. Sánchez’s Together for Peru (Juntos por el Perú) first demanded the annulment of all international votes, then of results from 1,751 polling stations in the capital, Lima, and finally, when only 0.4 per cent of votes hadn’t been counted, of the whole election process. Thousands of his supporters marched in Lima to support his claims.

It has taken several weeks to settle the contest, with roughly a quarter of a percentage point separating two candidates who together took under 30 per cent of the first-round vote. Sánchez’s contestation of the result is part of a pattern that has defined Peruvian politics for around a decade. Instability has become normal in a country whose political system can no longer produce clear or lasting winners.

Fragmentation and instability

Peru is often described as a democracy without parties. The party system that structured politics for much of the 20th century disintegrated in the 1990s and has never been rebuilt. It has given way to a sequence of improvised candidacies, regional movements and personal brands that rise and fall with their founders. Parties are temporary, put together for elections and discarded afterwards.

For the 12 April first round, the largest ballot paper in the country’s history listed 35 presidential candidates. Fujimori finished first with just 17.19 per cent. Behind her came a dense cluster with small margins between them. Sánchez took 12.04 per cent, just ahead of Rafael López Aliaga of Popular Renovation (Renovación Popular) on 11.91, with two other candidates scoring a little over 10 per cent, two more clearing seven per cent and the remaining 28 sharing 22.51 per cent between them. No candidate secured a fifth of the vote. Most people didn’t vote for either of the two who made the runoff.

Political fragmentation comes alongside extreme volatility. The forces that top one contest often collapse before the next, as voters shift in large groups from one personal vehicle to another.

Fragmentation makes Peru hard to govern, because the mandate of a president who’s elected on barely a fifth or sixth of the first-round vote is so weak that rivals can dispute it from day one. With the vote in congressional elections equally fragmented, congressional seats scatter across numerous parties, none of which dominates, but together they command enough votes to bring a government down. The many parties that lose the presidency collectively retain the power to remove the one that won it.

The consequence has been a decade of open warfare between the executive and legislative branches. Successive presidents, elected on low popular support and with no congressional majority, have faced assemblies controlled by their opponents, and Congress has repeatedly used its powers to remove them.

It’s easy to oust a president in Peru, because a constitutional clause allows Congress to declare a president’s ‘permanent moral incapacity’ on broad and vague grounds. This requires a two-thirds vote, something that’s supposed to set a high bar and make the move exceptional. But when rival blocs combine, they can easily clear the threshold. They’ve repeatedly done so.

The Congress elected in 2021 removed three presidents in one term. Castillo was ousted and arrested in December 2022 after trying to dissolve Congress to forestall his impeachment, and was later sentenced to over 11 years in prison. His vice-president, Dina Boluarte, succeeded him against the backdrop of protests the state met with lethal repression before being removed in October 2025 amid corruption allegations, a worsening crime wave and extremely low approval ratings. Congress president José Jerí then took office, only to be removed in February 2026 over undisclosed meetings with a Chinese business leader who held a state concession. Congress then installed José María Balcázar as a transitional president. The controversial 83-year-old former Supreme Court judge also faced corruption accusations, and his first President of the Council of Ministers resigned after three weeks.

The Fujimori legacy

The institutional architecture of instability results from the reign of Alberto Fujimori. Elected in 1990, Fujimori governed until 2000, but only the first two years as the constitutional president of Peru. In 1992, he dissolved Congress and imposed a new constitution that gave him decisive power. His government became synonymous with grand corruption and human rights atrocities, including the forced sterilisation of thousands of mostly Indigenous women.

Fujimori was forced out in 2000, when leaked videos showed his infamous intelligence chief bribing politicians. Fujimori fled to paternal homeland Japan, where his citizenship shielded him from extradition, and tried to resign by fax, only for Congress to refuse and remove him on the moral incapacity clause, which his 1993 constitution had retained. He was later extradited, convicted and imprisoned for crimes against humanity and corruption. President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski granted him a pardon in 2017, but in 2018 the Supreme Court annulled it and ordered him back to jail. He was finally freed by the Constitutional Court in 2023, and died in 2024.

His daughter inherited his movement. Her political apprenticeship began aged 19 in 1994, when she was made First Lady after her father stripped the title from her mother, who’d publicly accused him of corruption and serious human rights violations. Over the years, Keiko has faced long-running money-laundering investigations for illicit campaign financing. While she kept failing to become president, her party wielded considerable congressional power, playing its part in helping unseat successive presidents. She’ll now have to try to govern the fragmented system her party helped create.

The most significant recent institutional change was the reversal of her father’s decision to replace the bicameral Congress with a single chamber. The latest election saw 60 senators elected alongside 130 members of the Chamber of Deputies. The constitutional change went against a 2018 referendum in which 90 per cent of voters rejected a two-chamber Congress. With the moral incapacity clause left untouched, constitutional scholars warn the change will further concentrate congressional power. That suggests Peru can go one of two unpalatable ways: continued instability driven by congressional dominance, or the assertion of a second Fujimori authoritarian presidency.

The costs of dysfunction

The costs of instability have long been obscured by a belief that while Peruvian politics are chaotic, the economy runs itself. Economic fundamentals have remained strong by regional standards. 2025 inflation ran at around 1.5 per cent, among Latin America’s lowest, and the economy grew 3.4 per cent in 2024. The central bank is independent and credible, and public debt, at around 30 per cent of GDP, is relatively low. Through eight presidencies and three impeachments, markets have stayed calm and the currency has held.

But the costs of dysfunction are mounting. Economic growth has roughly halved over the decade of political turmoil. Poverty, at 27.6 per cent in 2024, remains above its pre-pandemic level, and the middle class has shrunk. Meanwhile, violent crime has surged, with homicides at 10.7 per 100,000 people, alongside an epidemic of extortion. The picture is one of gradual decay.

Young people are feeling the economic pinch hardest. In 2025, attempts to change the pension system that adversely impacted young people triggered a Gen Z-led mass protest movement, which quickly grew into a wider expression of anger at corruption, insecurity and political dysfunction. Security forces responded with violence.

The state’s violent response to protests is one indication of how political turmoil has caused a decline in the rights of people to organise, speak up and hold power to account. In December 2024, the CIVICUS Monitor, our online platform tracking civic space conditions around the world, downgraded Peru to repressed status, the second-worst rating, due to years of escalating state violence, harassment and vilification of human rights advocates and journalists, who political figures smear as terrorists and traitors. Boluarte’s government was condemned by international civil society groups and human rights institutions, including the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, over the killing of protesters in the crackdowns that followed Castillo’s removal.

In March 2025, Congress passed a law giving the Peruvian Agency for International Cooperation extensive powers to control, censor and persecute civil society organisations that receive foreign funding. The law requires civil society groups to obtain the agency’s prior approval for their activities and threatens fines of up to US$720,000 and the loss of registration. It makes it a punishable offence to use international funds to support legal or administrative action against the Peruvian state, imperilling any group that helps victims of state abuses seek redress at home or before international bodies.

Keiko can’t be expected to safeguard civic space and human rights. She came of age in a government that ran death squads, and ran on a law-and-order campaign under the slogan ‘Fujimori returns, order returns’. She spoke to Peruvians’ greatest concern, insecurity, by casting today’s fight against crime as a sequel to her father’s 1990s war on the Shining Path terrorist group, promising mass deployments of police and soldiers.

Keiko has been evasive on the abuses of the 1990s, recasting human rights as a matter of access to basic services in order to deflect calls for redress for past wrongs. In defiance of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, her party championed a 2025 amnesty law that pardoned members of the armed forces, the police and armed civilian organisations for any offence (excluding terrorism and corruption) committed in the context of the ‘anti-subversive struggle’ between 1980 and 2000. This encompasses a wide range of serious human rights violations.

A politician who’s become president on the basis of such a slender victory might be expected to compromise, seek consensus and moderate their more extreme positions. But Keiko may see any attempt to do so as an invitation for yet another bout of congressional muscle-flexing that leads to her ousting. The incentives would seem to point to her trying to break the cycle as her father did, by concentrating power and dismantling institutions that might constrain her. If she manages to avoid impeachment, for at least the next five years Peru will be in the hands of a politician with a long record of attacking civic space and human rights, and with every motivation to keep doing so.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org