MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Fujimori nears victory in Peru's presidential count as the left calls for protests

The overseas vote, already tallied, heavily favored Fujimori while within Peru the balance tilted toward Sánchez

Ten days after the June 7 presidential runoff, Peru still has no proclaimed winner, but the right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori is heading toward victory. With 99.1% of the vote counted, she leads the left-wing Roberto Sánchez by some 36,889 votes and is projected as the virtual winner, while the left pushes mobilizations and nullity appeals. The official proclamation remains pending on 0.84% of tally sheets under review, with a deadline of mid-July.

The remaining contested tally sheets come mostly from Lima and Callao, where Fujimori has her electoral stronghold, so analysts expect the gap to widen in her favor. “At this point, it is practically impossible for Sánchez to reverse the vote difference,” said political scientist Fernando Tuesta, who described the runoff as one of the closest in the country's history, with a margin below 1%.

The count depicts a country split in two. The overseas vote, already tallied, heavily favored Fujimori —she won 76.4% in the United States, home to the largest Peruvian community abroad— while within Peru the balance tilted toward Sánchez, with about 50.1% against 49.8%. That divergence, decisive in the result, led some sectors to question the vote of residents abroad, and an ally of Sánchez filed an appeal to annul it.

Sánchez's party, Juntos por el Perú, called a “great national mobilization” in Lima for Friday in “defense of the popular vote” and denounced in a communiqué the “lack of transparency” of the process. Sánchez himself, however, called for respecting the results and demanding transparency: “Recounting and transparency do not harm democracy but strengthen it,” he said. Political scientists Paula Távara and Eduardo Dargent agree that, so far, the candidate has avoided alleging fraud and is rather seeking to “show strength.” The challenges, in any case, have not been exclusive to the left: an electoral jury in Puno dismissed seven nullity appeals filed by the Fujimori camp, which sought to annul more than 7,000 votes in the south of the country.

Sánchez gathered the rural vote of the impoverished south, linked to former president Pedro Castillo, imprisoned for a self-coup attempt in 2022. Fujimori, daughter of the late former president Alberto Fujimori —sentenced to 25 years for human-rights violations and corruption— reaches a runoff for the fourth consecutive time, with a campaign centered on security. Unlike in 2021, when she alleged fraud after losing to Castillo, this time she has been restrained. If her win is confirmed, she would add the Executive to the majority her party already holds in Congress, in a country that has had eight presidents in a decade.