On her fourth run for Peru's highest office, the country's most enduring and most polarizing political figure finally won — by the narrowest of margins.
A win fifteen years in the making
Keiko Fujimori, 50, defeated the psychologist and left-leaning politician Roberto Sánchez after losing presidential runoffs in 2011, 2016 and 2021. With the count complete, she took about 50.1 percent to Sánchez's 49.9 percent — a margin of roughly 50,000 votes out of more than 18 million cast. The tally was agonizing: Sánchez led as domestic ballots came in first, then Fujimori pulled ahead once votes from Peruvians abroad were counted. Sánchez did not immediately concede and alleged irregularities in the handling of expatriate ballots, but electoral authorities found no grounds to overturn the result. "The result reflects the country's divisions," analyst Paulo Vilca told Al Jazeera. "Whoever wins will have half the country against them."
Daughter of a contested legacy
Fujimori's story is inseparable from her father's. Alberto Fujimori, who governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, died in September 2024, two years before his daughter's victory. Supporters credit his rule with crushing the Shining Path insurgency and ending hyperinflation; critics and Peruvian courts reached a harsher verdict — he was convicted of crimes against humanity, including extrajudicial killings, and imprisoned before a release in his final year. Keiko, made first lady at 19 after her parents separated, built Peru's most powerful party, Fuerza Popular, on that inheritance. She has acknowledged that "crimes" occurred under his administration while also backing measures that would have eased his imprisonment. Her own record adds another layer: she was held in pretrial detention three times over campaign-finance money-laundering allegations, spending roughly 17 months jailed before a court dismissed the case on procedural grounds. Supporters call the prosecutions political; opponents see impunity.
Order or chaos
Fujimori distilled her campaign into a stark choice: "Order or chaos — these are the two options our country faces today," she told supporters, per Americas Quarterly. She cast herself as defender of the market economic model Peru adopted in the 1990s and promised a hard line on rising crime, drawing affluent urban voters and the diaspora. Sánchez drew poorer and rural communities skeptical that three decades of market-led growth had delivered enough. The Atlantic Council described Fujimori as Washington's "preferred candidate" and a partner on security, while noting analysts expect her to balance pragmatically between the United States and China.
The ninth president in a decade
When she is inaugurated, Fujimori will become Peru's ninth president in ten years — a stretch of impeachments, resignations and scandals in which every elected president has faced corruption investigations. She inherits a fractured Congress where no party holds a majority, and analysts warn "governability risks shall remain elevated." Economic growth has slowed sharply from the boom years, and she will need to show the country's model can deliver for the communities that voted against her three times. Across a region still sorting out its political direction, her narrow win reads less as a sweeping rightward wave than as proof of her movement's stubborn durability — and of a nation split almost exactly in half.
