Peruvians to Elect New President Amid Polarized, Tight Race

LIMA, Peru — Peruvians will elect their new president Sunday with polls suggesting a polarized but tight race between perennial hard-right candidate Keiko Fujimori and leftist Roberto Sánchez. Fujimori had been polling a few points ahead, with around a quarter of voters still undecided, but Reuters reports Sánchez could have narrowed the gap in the last week. Keiko, as she's known in Peru, is running on the legacy of her father, the late, disgraced strongman President Alberto Fujimori. That legacy includes crushing both hyperinflation and the Maoist insurgents of the Shining Path, who bathed Peru in blood in the 1980s and 1990s. It also includes running death squads — for which he was eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison — shuttering congress, bribing journalists and epic corruption. "If she wins, there will be performative moderation. There will be this discourse about dialogue and democracy, but the reality will be that she will have her hands on the levers of power and will use them in an authoritarian way," predicts political scientist Paula Távara. "If there are protests, expect a repressive response." The runoff vote will be the fourth in a row for Keiko Fujimori, 51, after narrowly losing in 2011, 2016 and 2021. Many Peruvians accuse her of being a bad loser, who for months refused to acknowledge her loss in 2016 and then made unfounded accusations of electoral fraud in 2021. They also blame her for using her Popular Force party, the largest in the last two congressional terms, to block corruption and organized crime investigations and to destabilize multiple governments, contributing to Peru's calamitous run of nine presidents in the last decade. Now she is offering to reprise her father's mano dura or iron fist approach to the violent crime wave sweeping the Andean nation, including an extortion epidemic, and reimpose "order" — even though many of her critics say she is the primary culprit for the chaos in Peru's politics and streets. Yet if she is poised to take the presidency, it is in large part because Sánchez, 57, is also a deeply disliked candidate. He has been campaigning in the sombrero given to him by Pedro Castillo, the leftist former president who beat Fujimori in 2021 but whose administration collapsed within 18 months amid accusations of extremism, incompetence and graft. He was eventually ousted and jailed in December 2022 after, in a failed bid to avoid corruption probes, attempting to also shutter congress and the courts. While Keiko has been offering to attract more foreign investment by cutting red tape, Sánchez initially promised to nationalize large sectors of the economy and to replace imports with local production — an economic policy reminiscent of Cuba or North Korea. He has since been trying to shuffle to the center. But his claims of moderation have been undermined by the presence on his team of Antauro Humala, a radical former army officer, who served a lengthy jail term for leading a 2005 military uprising in which several police officers were murdered, an event for which he remains unrepentant. Polls close at 5 p.m. Peruvian time. A winner may be declared later that night, but if the vote is close, it could be days before there is a definitive result.