With 99.663 percent of ballots counted and a lead of barely 41,860 votes in Peru’s second round, Keiko Fujimori, leader of the far-right Fuerza Popular party and daughter of late dictator Alberto Fujimori, is claiming victory in the contest to become Peru’s ninth president in a decade.
The results do not reflect a popular mandate. They are the product of an electoral process riddled with irregularities—polling sites that never opened in working class neighborhoods, ballot boxes found abandoned on roadsides, and the forced resignation of Piero Corvetto, the head of the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE)—all of which express the terminal crisis of what passes for Peruvian bourgeois democracy.
Post-electoral protests erupted immediately. In Lima, Puno and Juliaca, thousands took to the streets denouncing the intervention of external actors to favor Fujimori. The National Elections Tribunal (JNE) has so far rejected the challenges filed by rival candidate Roberto Sánchez and his party, Juntos por el Perú.
On June 19, Roberto Sánchez mobilized supporters in Lima as police blocked their march from reaching Plaza San Martín, the epicenter of anti-government protests. Sánchez declared “three weeks of vigilant struggle” as Peru reels from a razor-thin runoff that has left the country bitterly polarized.
Sánchez demands the JNE annul votes in Lima and the US, while Fujimori pressures the same body to certify her victory. The state responded by militarizing Lima’s historic center through June 22 with the deployment of 4,500 police, 800 municipal agents, 1,000 surveillance cameras and 15 drones—a stark reminder that behind the electoral facade stands the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state.
The ruling class closes ranks—Washington intervenes
The Peruvian elections unfolded as the Trump administration escalates its interventions in the internal affairs of countries across Latin America. Washington’s aim is to install far-right governments it can more easily control, hoping that they will expel Chinese economic influence from the region and prepare a massive crackdown on the working class in the event of social explosions.
Central to US strategic concerns in Peru is the Chancay megaport, inaugurated in November 2025 and built by Chinese state company COSCO. Chancay makes Peru a key logistics hub connecting South America to Asia and directly threatens US dominance over regional trade routes. The Trump administration has responded with a $1.5 billion Pentagon appropriation to move Peru’s naval base to the north of the port. It has called for designating Peru a “major non-NATO ally,” and deployed over 1,200 US troops on Peruvian territory—all decisions debated by no candidate and covered by virtually no corporate media outlet during the campaign.
US Ambassador Bernie Navarro has been the on-the-ground organizer of this intervention. Before the vote, he announced he would personally lead a team of US “observers”—arrogating to Washington the supposed right to delegitimize any result it deems unfavorable. After the vote, he declared publicly that the US Embassy is “monitoring the electoral process”—a statement with no basis in Peruvian law, which grants no such official capacity to foreign diplomatic missions.
The corporate press, dominated by the oligarchic Miró Quesada family—owners of El Comercio and Expreso—ran an openly anticommunist campaign against Sánchez, branding him a communist and warning that Peru would become “another Venezuela” if he were elected.
The ruling class’s preference for Fujimori stems from a concrete calculation: squeezed between the mounting pressure of US imperialism from above and the pressure of a combative working class from below, Peru’s bourgeoisie cannot tolerate even the slightest illusions in social reform that could fuel the class struggle.
A Sánchez government, however committed to “macroeconomic stability and institutional continuity”—his explicit promises to the financial markets and Washington—would have taken office wrapped in the language of social justice and the weight of popular expectations built up by the election and overthrow of former President Pedro Castillo. That, for the ruling class and for imperialism, was an unacceptable risk.
The Fujimori formula was stated plainly by Keiko herself in 2021: “What Peru needs is not democracy but demodura“—a term she coined, joining the Spanish words for “democracy” and “hard”—a euphemism for dictatorship.
The fraud allegation from Sánchez
Roberto Sánchez’s denunciation of “fraud” is a political maneuver in defense of his faction of the state bureaucracy and ruling class, not a defense of democratic principles. Sánchez—a former minister of foreign trade and tourism under Pedro Castillo, currently under investigation for financial misrepresentation—does not represent the working class.
His campaign, modeled closely on Castillo’s 2021 run, promoted the same populist nationalism that has already proven its bankruptcy. The geography of the vote confirms this: Sánchez won in the same Quechua and Aymara regions where Castillo defeated Fujimori overwhelmingly. Those same regions rose up for three months after Castillo’s removal in a parliamentary coup overseen by the CIA in December 2022. Dina Boluarte ordered live ammunition deployed against the protesters. Fifty people were killed; the population began calling the president “Dina Asesina.”
What a Fujimori government means
Keiko Fujimori is the heir to the 1993 constitution imposed by her father after he dissolved Congress in a “self-coup” in 1992 and governed as a dictator. Alberto Fujimori was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to 25 years; he died in a hospital without having served his full term. His legacy is a constitutional order that opened Peru’s natural resources to unfettered exploitation by transnational corporations and domestic conglomerates, while systematically dismantling labor protections.
The myth that fujimorismo defeated the Maoist guerrilla group Shining Path is a historical falsification. Shining Path was already liquidated, repudiated by the very peasant communities it claimed to represent, before Fujimori assumed power. The real function of fujimorismo was to crush the working class.
Keiko Fujimori’s program is the continuation of this model: unrestricted investment for transnational capital and national conglomerates, abolition of labor rights, intensified exploitation of the working class, the peasantry and unemployed youth, backed by the open repression of the state apparatus. Her proposals during the campaign included arming police with intelligence capabilities, coordinating with the armed forces, punishing convicted extortionists with “civil death” (barring them from public office or employment). All of this would leave intact the pro-crime laws that protect mafias, congressmen, judges and prosecutors.
Her “demodura” already has its legal scaffolding: last week the fujimorista-controlled Congress pushed through a new law—backed by the National Police and Armed Forces—transferring crimes committed by police and military personnel to military courts. The goal is to shield uniformed killers from civilian justice.
Fujimori’s victory will close the corruption case that should have ended her political career. She faced a prosecution request of 30 years in prison for money laundering in the “Los Cócteles” case involving millions of illicit dollars from Odebrecht and local businessmen channeled through fake charity fundraisers, with individual contributions of $500 and at least one reaching $3,400.
This is the government that will administer one of the most acute social crises in Peru’s modern history. Small and micro-enterprises (mypes) employ 48 percent of the economically active population; 70 to 80 percent of their workers are informal, with average incomes of 858 soles (US$253.55) per month against a basic family basket for four of 1,848 soles (US$546.11). Nearly nine million Peruvians live in poverty; 1.6 million in extreme poverty.
These are the fruits of 33 years of the Fujimorista constitution: transnational capital entered with capital-intensive operations, industry was concentrated in national conglomerates and mass unemployment was absorbed into mypes of fewer than ten workers, many family-run.
In parallel, much of a generation of youth between 16 and 29 has been relegated to a category known as “ninis,” neither working nor studying. Some have fallen prey to recruitment by organized extortion gangs. Today professional mafias control working class districts in Lima, Callao, and Trujillo. The answer offered in the presidential debates—strengthening the security forces—will only deepen repression against the working class, peasants, students, health workers, drivers and small business owners.
What the first-round results revealed
On April 6, in the first round of the elections, the real winner was the vote of rejection: 30.8 percent—8.4 million voters—cast null or blank ballots or abstained, more than the combined total of the two top finishers. Fuerza Popular’s Fujimori received 17.06 percent; Juntos por el Perú’s Sánchez, 12.04 percent; and the far-right Renovación Popular’s Rafael López Aliaga—who deployed Trump-style “fraud” allegations to lay the groundwork for post-electoral destabilization—finished third with 11.89 percent. Of the 36 candidacies on the ballot, most had no coherent program or are heading toward extinction, like APRA, Peru’s oldest party. The Peruvian working class has no party of its own.
The task posed by the crisis of bourgeois rule in Peru is not to choose between two managers of capital. It is to build the political independence of the working class on a socialist and internationalist program—through the construction of independent rank-and-file committees in workplaces, working class neighborhoods, universities and peasant communities, as part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), and through the building of a Peruvian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.