Andean Group - July 2026

Keiko Fujimori will take office as Peru’s new president on 28 July after winning the narrowest of victories in the 7 June run-off election. This was fourth time lucky for Fujimori and marks the culmination of a 15-year march towards the presidency. She inherits an immensely divided country in which the majority of voters residing within Peru voted for her left-wing rival, Roberto Sánchez. As Fujimori becomes Peru’s ninth president in 10 years, the main question hanging over her is whether she can arrest the country’s chronic political instability – which has been driven in large part by the congressional manoeuvres of her right-wing Fuerza Popular (FP).

It took nearly a month for Fujimori to be officially declared the election’s winner, as the glacial pace of vote counting fuelled unproven allegations from Sánchez that the results had been tampered with. The final result could scarcely have been closer. Fujimori defeated Sánchez by 50.135%-49.865%, with less than 50,000 votes separating the two candidates, out of 18.4m that were cast.

As well as the razor-thin margin of victory, Fujimori is also likely to face questions over whether she holds a true democratic mandate, given that the election was swung by voters living abroad, among whom Fujimori won by 63.208%-36.792%. Sánchez won the domestic vote by 50.088%-49.912%, with a lead of around 32,000 votes.

This was Fujimori’s fourth shot at the presidency, after suffering narrow defeats in 2011, 2016 and 2021. She previously struggled with negative associations with her late father, authoritarian former president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), who was later convicted of human rights abuses and corruption. Yet after years in which the Fujimori name weighed on Keiko’s electoral prospects, anti-Fujimorismo seems to have waned this electoral cycle amid rising concern about violent crime.

Indeed, Fujimori leaned into her father’s legacy as the strongman who crushed the Sendero Luminoso (SL) guerrilla group. As was the case in Colombia’s recent election, insecurity was a defining feature of the campaign, and Fujimori’s promise of a hardline stance proved more popular than the narrative of broad economic reform put forward by Sánchez, who hoped to revive the radical agenda of imprisoned former president Pedro Castillo (2021-2022).

Sánchez garnered support among rural and indigenous Peruvians, promising an overhaul of the constitution to grant greater recognition and autonomy to different indigenous groups, as well as state oversight of natural resources and increased taxes for the highest earners. Sánchez won over 80% of the vote in the regions of Apurímac, Huancavelica and Puno. It is likely not coincidental that Apurímac and Huancavelica, as well as Cusco and Ayacucho (where Sánchez won over 70% of the vote) were some of the regions most impacted during the military campaign against SL in the 1990s, as well as by the forced sterilisation campaign that targeted mostly indigenous women under Alberto Fujimori.

Fujimori’s presidency will be the first since her father’s first term to run alongside a bicameral legislature, with the senate returning for the first time since it was dissolved in 1992 amid Alberto Fujimori’s autogolpe (self-coup). There is widespread agreement that the unicameral system, initially intended to boost the president’s authority against the legislature, has led to a concentration of power that has made impeaching the president far too easy. José Jerí (2025-2026) was the third consecutive president to suffer this fate in February after just four months in office, following the impeachments of Dina Boluarte (2022-2023) and Castillo. Prior to that, Manuel Vizcarra (2018-2020) was also impeached, while Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016-2018) and Manuel Merino (2020) both resigned to avoid being removed in this manner.

Fujimori will take some reassurance from the fact that it was her own FP party, which remains the largest in both chambers of the legislature (41 out of 130 seats in the chamber of deputies and 22 out of 60 in the senate), that led most of these impeachment campaigns and blocked the agendas of some of her predecessors. Although Sánchez’s left-wing Juntos por el Perú (JPP) is the second largest party, with 32 seats in the lower chamber and 14 in the senate, and has announced an alliance with the centre-left Ahora Nación (AN, 10 and four) and Partido Cívico Obras (PCO, 15 and five), it is unlikely to be able to oppose Fujimori in the same way that she has managed to do to previous administrations.

However, Sánchez has made it clear that he does have a wide base of popular support, particularly in the highland and Amazonian regions, and has already demonstrated that he is able to summon his supporters to protest on the streets, as they did in Lima in June. It may well be that he returns to this strategy to oppose any particularly controversial measures that Fujimori seeks to pass.

Fujimori has outlined her economic plan for her time in office, with the main objectives being to increase foreign investment (aiming to attract US$5-7bn annually, which she says would generate 500,000 jobs), and pursue deregulation by removing around 500 bureaucratic processes. Luis Carranza, one of Fujimori’s economic advisers who is viewed as a potential finance minister in her administration, told Ecuadorean news outlet Primicias on 30 June that the excessive growth of the State began under former president Ollanta Humala (2011-2016), who was incidentally the last Peruvian leader to serve a full term in office. Carranza said that under Humala “the exacerbated growth of the State started, with the unnecessary increase in regulations and processes, which ends up generating weaknesses and reducing economic growth”.

In a report issued on 2 July, credit ratings agency Moody’s welcomed the likely policy continuity that would come with a Fujimori presidency and said that she could potentially break the deadlock on delayed mining and infrastructure projects. This, Moody’s said, could support growth rates of around 3.5%. There is also hope that a stable presidency may lessen the political risks currently associated with investment in Peru, although this will depend on her ability to defuse tensions with different social movements and avoid the violent street protests that some of her predecessors have faced.

In a move aimed at reassuring the markets, Fujimori announced on 6 July that the long-serving central bank president, Julio Velarde, would remain in his position for another five-year term. Velarde has held this role since 2006 and is widely viewed as a key factor in Peru’s relative economic stability over the past two decades despite the political churn. Fujimori will be the 11^th president he has served under.

Although she has promised to work to unite what is clearly a very polarised country, this would be a far cry from the approach her party has pursued in congress in recent years, where it has advanced controversial legislation such as pardoning war crimes committed during her father’s counterinsurgency campaign.

One proposal aimed at building popular support is a promise that 40% of mining royalties would go to local communities, as well as offering tax breaks for companies that reinvest profits in Peru. It remains to be seen if this will be enough to win over Sánchez’s supporters and achieve the stability Peru has been seeking for so long.