Peru’s final vote count on Friday confirmed Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez as the top two finishers in the country’s April 12 presidential election, triggering a June 7 runoff to select the nation’s ninth president in 10 years. The results followed a fractured contest where 33 other candidates split the remaining support, reflecting voter frustration with an entrenched political class as violent crime and public corruption deepen.
Tallying the votes required officials to authorize a one-day voting extension for more than 52,000 Lima residents and for registered voters in Orlando, Florida, and Paterson, New Jersey. Authorities announced the Monday extension after logistical breakdowns prevented thousands from reaching polling stations on election day, prompting voting boards to adjust procedures after Sunday evening counting had already begun.
Fujimori, running for the conservative Fuerza Popular party, and Sánchez, representing the nationalist Juntos por el Perú party, have both built their post-election messaging around public security. Extortion across Peru has climbed fivefold during the past five years, generating intense pressure on the next administration to dismantle criminal networks.
Speaking to the press Friday after the vote count concluded, Sánchez called for a “grand democratic coalition” to defeat what he described as a criminal underworld aligned with a “political mafia” in Congress, a group he said includes Fujimori’s party. The former trade minister also highlighted his cultural background during his remarks, noting that his traditional peasant hat represents “the expression of all hats and of the diversity” of Peru.
Fujimori, seeking the presidency for the fourth time, addressed supporters from the coastal La Libertad region and pointed to the security record of her father, former president Alberto Fujimori. She noted that his administration dismantled the Shining Path rebel group and stopped hyperinflation in the early 1990s, and promised to bring the same approach to current security challenges so Peruvians can “live in peace.”
The two candidates outline different legal strategies for confronting organized crime. Fujimori’s party has supported recent legislation that legal experts say raises barriers to criminal prosecutions, including measures that removed preliminary detention in certain cases and increased the evidentiary threshold for seizing criminal assets. Sánchez has promised to repeal those provisions and expand police intelligence operations to track extortion groups.
Sánchez also laid out economic proposals that diverge from Peru’s market-friendly policies of the past two decades. He has said he would like to renegotiate mining contracts to collect higher state taxes, assign rural communities ownership stakes in local mines, and restrict open-pit operations. Peru has sustained more than 3% economic growth in 2024 and 2025, buoyed by its position as the world’s second-largest copper producer, though advancing Sánchez’s agenda would be difficult without a majority in Congress.
Will Freeman, a fellow for Latin American Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Fujimori is “perhaps Peru’s only remaining career politician and the only one with a real political party,” citing her established nationwide organizational structure. This apparatus could help her coordinate security operations, though Freeman expects her anti-crime enforcement to be applied selectively.
“She and that party have in the past sponsored legislation against organized crime that ironically created many of the tools that prosecutors used to investigate them in the 2010s,” Freeman said, referencing the corruption probes that have targeted Fujimori herself. “Now, they have since led the charge to destroy a lot of those mechanisms in the legislation.”
The winner of the June 7 runoff will be sworn in on July 28 for a single five-year term.