Peru's general election of April 12 has confirmed what polls had long suggested: a second round on June 7 between Keiko Fujimori of Fuerza Popular and Rafael López Aliaga of Renovación Popular, whilst simultaneously producing an institutional crisis severe enough to cloud whatever mandate either candidate eventually receives.

With just over half the votes counted, Fujimori leads on roughly 17% of valid votes, López Aliaga follows on around 15%, and Jorge Nieto Montesinos of Partido del Buen Gobierno sits third on 13%. In a field of 35 candidates, those margins were always going to be the outcome. What was not anticipated was the scale of the organisational collapse that accompanied them.

The Office of National Electoral Processes (ONPE) failed to deliver ballot materials to 187 polling tables across southern Lima districts, disenfranchising more than 52,000 voters. The contractor responsible, Servicios Generales Galaga, had been sanctioned by ONPE on three previous occasions for near-identical failures, employed just 13 staff, and was still soliciting subcontractors on social media a week before polling day, according to El Comercio.

Anti-corruption prosecutors reportedly raided the ONPE headquarters during the afternoon of election day. The Junta Nacional de Justicia announced it would review whether ONPE chief Piero Corvetto should lose his ratification entirely. The JNE ordered affected tables to reopen on April 13, but only after exit poll data had already circulated publicly, a sequencing that legal analysts condemned as constitutionally indefensible.

López Aliaga filed a criminal complaint against Corvetto, calling the situation "electoral fraud unique in the world" – a characterisation without evidential basis, but one that will remain politically available to whichever candidate loses in June. In a country that spent 2021 tearing itself apart over fraud allegations, the institutional self-inflicted wound could hardly have come at a worse moment.

Peru elected a bicameral Congress for the first time in 34 years, restoring the Senate that Alberto Fujimori abolished in his 1993 constitution. The new chamber, with 60 seats, tighter entry thresholds, and, crucially, immune from presidential dissolution, was sold as a structural brake on the congressional overreach that has destroyed every administration since 2016.

With roughly 30% of votes counted, the early Senate picture is striking and, for Fujimori, politically inconvenient. Renovación Popular leads on around 20%, Partido del Buen Gobierno follows on 15%, and Fuerza Popular sits third on 13%. The party that spent nearly a decade treating Congress as a personal veto mechanism is, for now, a minority in the chamber it once monopolised.

That matters enormously, but not necessarily in the way the reform's architects intended. The outgoing unicameral Congress was widely accused of operating what critics called a pacto mafioso: a cross-party bloc, anchored by Fuerza Popular and Renovación Popular, that coordinated to pass legislation weakening anti-corruption prosecutors, protect sitting members from judicial scrutiny, and install loyalists in nominally independent institutions. The same parties now lead the new Senate. Renovación Popular, first in the count, was a core member of that bloc. The chamber designed to check congressional abuse is opening its doors with the architects of that abuse holding the most seats.

The implications diverge sharply depending on who wins in June. A López Aliaga presidency would begin with a Senate where his own party holds the largest bloc, setting the stage for an almost unprecedented alignment in a country where executive-legislative warfare is the norm. The temptation to use that advantage to replicate the obstruction model against opponents, rather than dismantle it, will be considerable. A Fujimori presidency would face a more complex arithmetic: her party has weakened in the Senate, potentially subject to the same pressure she once applied to others. Whether Renovación Popular would extend legislative discipline to a Fujimori executive or turn the new chamber into another instrument of destabilisation is entirely open. What is not open is the broader pattern: the Senate was meant to be a new institution. On current numbers, it will be the old Congress with a second room.

The likely run-off presents not a left-right contest but a competition between two distinct conservative traditions with genuinely different social bases, international alignments, and governing implications.

Fujimori is the handpicked candidate of Peru's economic establishment. Her voter coalition is anchored in the northern coastal cities, Lima's formal business sector, and constituencies carefully cultivated by Fuerza Popular's organisational machinery over fifteen years. That machinery matters: whilst other Peruvian parties have collapsed between election cycles, Fujimorismo has maintained a disciplined congressional presence that has functioned less as a legislative force and more as a veto power over whoever holds the executive. Since 2016, Fuerza Popular has held an outright congressional majority and used it to destabilise several consecutive presidents through impeachment motions, budget blockades, and relentless judicial pressure.

The figure at the centre of that political inheritance is her father, disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori, who died in 2024 convicted of crimes against humanity. His government deployed death squads against civilians, sterilised indigenous and rural women by force, and ran an intelligence apparatus that bribed judges and bought congressional votes on camera — and, with direct relevance to the present moment, abolished the Senate itself. That Keiko can still campaign on his memory without political cost says more about Peru's institutional exhaustion than about any rehabilitation of his record. Her own ongoing criminal proceedings linked to alleged Odebrecht campaign financing add a starker dimension: a presidential term would suspend them, giving her a direct personal incentive to win that her opponents exploit at every opportunity.

López Aliaga is a former Citibank executive and infrastructure magnate who built his fortune through PeruRail and luxury hotels in Cusco before entering politics. He won Lima's mayoralty in 2022, resigned in October 2025, and is now running for president on a platform of hard-line security and fiscal conservatism. An Opus Dei member and admirer of far-right leaders such as Trump and Bolsonaro, his base is concentrated in working-class Lima districts most exposed to the crime wave that has doubled Peru's homicide rate since 2019. These voters distrust the Fujimorista establishment but still want someone they read as genuinely fearless. López Aliaga polls above 30% in Lima whilst remaining weak across the rural south and highlands, a geographic imbalance that would define and constrain any presidency he attempted to run.

Geopolitically, the differences collapse under scrutiny. Both candidates will tilt towards Washington and position Peru within the regional conservative bloc amid an entrenched rightward shift in Latin America. However, both face the same unmovable constraint: Chinese capital in Peruvian mining and infrastructure, anchored by the COSCO-operated Chancay Port, is now structurally embedded in the country's export economy. No incoming president survives disrupting that relationship. Declaratory alignment with the United States, operational pragmatism with Beijing. That is the only viable foreign policy Peru has, regardless of who wins.

Peru has notoriously had nine presidents in ten years. The incoming Congress will be heavily fragmented, the mandate thin, and the credibility of the electoral process itself now openly contested. The Senate is a real reform, but one whose value will be determined entirely by the political culture operating within it. Whoever wins in June inherits not just a country in crisis, but a political system that spent election day demonstrating, in real time, exactly why nobody trusts it.