Keiko Fujimori has an opportunity that no one has had since 2000, facing a hardline, resilient, and fanatical left waiting its turn.

By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by La Razón, 30 August, 2026

Peru has just inaugurated its tenth head of state in eleven years. It’s worth pausing to consider that phrase: it doesn’t describe a passing crisis, it describes a system. Three former presidents are spending the night in Barbadillo, the prison Lima built to house those who have governed the country. A fourth was released in July after the Constitutional Court overturned his conviction. When a republic needs a prison for its former presidents, the problem is no longer with the presidents. Keiko Fujimori was sworn in on July 28, on her third attempt, after losing the elections in 2011, 2016, and 2021. She won by 49,244 votes out of more than eighteen million cast. 27 hundredths of a point. For almost three weeks, the vote count placed her behind the far-left candidate Roberto Sánchez; the gap only shifted in the final stretch. The National Elections Board did not officially proclaim her the winner until July 3, expressly ruling out any possibility of fraud. In the first round he led with 17.19%, the lowest threshold in Peruvian electoral history.

The causes of this chronic instability are well-known, yet no one addresses them. The 1993 Constitution established a strong presidential system that presupposed parties capable of sustaining it. They are dead. Political scientist Martín Tanaka aptly described the phenomenon in 2005: “democracy without parties.” Today, there are 43 registered parties, none with any significant institutional presence.

To this void is added a weapon: Article 113 allows for the removal of the president for “permanent moral incapacity.” Congress has transformed it into a motion of censure without checks and balances: it requires no crime, no conviction, no formal accusation. It was with this motion that Vizcarra fell (with ample justification, it must be said). It was also with this motion that Boluarte fell in October 2025, by unanimous vote of the 122 congressmen present, without him appearing to defend himself.

The third ingredient is missing: the moral one. The Odebrecht case implicated the Peruvian elite of three decades: Toledo, García, Humala, Kuczynski. Alan García committed suicide in 2019 when the police came to arrest him. That convinced half of Peru that the difference between parties was one of name, not conduct: the precondition of the anti-establishment vote , which explains why a rural teacher with encyclopedic ignorance and no political experience won the presidency in 2021.

What’s disconcerting is that all this is happening in an objectively rich country . “Peru is a beggar sitting on a bench of gold,” goes the phrase attributed to Antonio Raimondi, although his own museum has documented that he never wrote it. It’s apocryphal, and it has been more successful than the original because it describes what Peruvians see when they look in the mirror. The data supports this perception. The world’s second-largest copper producer. One of the planet’s 17 megadiverse countries. Its per capita income hovers around $20,000 in purchasing power parity, and a third of its population lives in poverty. Where there is institutional predictability—Machu Picchu is proof of that—Peru creates wealth with remarkable efficiency. Peru is also today an island of calm in a neighborhood ablaze. Its homicide rate was 10.7 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2025. Ecuador has been the most violent country in Latin America for three consecutive years, with 4,154 murders in the first half of 2026 alone. Colombia has more than 27,000 members in narco-terrorist or paramilitary terrorist groups and 70 massacres by July alone. Peru, which suffered 20 years of brutal Maoist terrorism, has pacified to a degree that deserves recognition. Its problem today is not homicide: it is extortion, which has increased fivefold in three years, with Lima’s public transportation system as the main victim.

There remains the great Peruvian anomaly. It’s best to say this without euphemisms, because euphemism has been this group’s best ally for 60 years. The Latin American left has bequeathed the region a catalog of ruins without exception : Cuba has been a prison with a beach for six decades; Venezuela has expelled almost eight million of its citizens while destroying the world’s largest oil reserves; Nicaragua strips its dissidents of their nationality. None of them have paid the price: they are recycled in international forums and received with reverence in Madrid. The São Paulo Forum, founded by Lula and Fidel Castro in 1990, and the Puebla Group coordinate the operation with a consistency that the right has never matched. Peru, however, is something else entirely. Starting with a trait that baffles Europeans: here, one proclaims oneself right-wing without taking refuge in the “center-right” or apologizing. It is a country without euphemisms, and that applies to both sides. Peronism, Chavismo, and Correism are all personalistic populisms willing to negotiate everything except power. 
The Peruvian left is ideological to its core, and that’s why it’s infinitely more dangerous.

First: the parties declare what they are, without the pretext of false moderation based on the current political circumstances, which others display before European foreign ministries. Perú Libre, which brought Pedro Castillo to power, defines itself as “Marxist-Leninist-Mariáteguist.” Its founder, Vladimir Cerrón, convicted of corruption, speaks of “youth battalions” and “leveling the playing field.” This is classic Leninist lexicon, not populist rhetoric.

Second: the coalition that nearly won in June includes the Peruvian Communist Party and the Maoist-rooted Peruvian Communist Party-Red Fatherland. This isn’t just my insinuation; it’s the documented composition of Together for Peru since 2017. Antauro Humala’s ethno-nationalist movement joined the coalition, even going so far as to claim Tarapacá and Arica “by diplomatic or armed means.” That such an amalgam came close to winning the presidency without Europe batting an eye says more about Brussels than about Lima.

Third: there is a distinct intellectual canon . Chavismo needed to import Bolívar and oil revenues. Peruvian Marxism doesn’t import anything: it has José Carlos Mariátegui, whose “Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality” (1928) remain required reading in public universities. His thesis—that the indigenous problem is, fundamentally, the land problem—connects the social question with the ethnic and territorial ones within a national framework that no other leftist movement on the continent possesses, and it is precisely this ideological “purity” that makes it more dangerous, more tenacious, and more toxic. Peruvian irony: his grandson, Aldo Mariátegui, is today one of his fiercest critics.

Add to this what that left has never done: settle accounts with its dead. The Truth Commission attributed more than half of those seventy thousand deaths to it. There has been no repentance or unequivocal condemnation, but rather the opposite: MOVADEF, heir to the political arm of Shining Path, has spent years infiltrating teachers’ unions and university federations. When they came to power in 2021, the experiment lasted 16 months and ended with the president attempting to dissolve Congress by decree and being sentenced to eleven years. Fanaticism, utter incompetence, and simultaneous plunder: the complete repertoire.

Their favorite excuse remains : that the southern Andes vote against Lima because Lima abandoned them. This is false : the regions and municipalities manage their own money since Toledo’s decentralization and also collect mining and gas royalties. In 2025 alone, mining transferred more than 10 billion soles to them; since 2004, more than 60 billion. Some manage substantial budgets and leave nearly a third unspent—more than 1 billion soles a year—while re-electing corrupt demagogues, almost always from the left. Cajamarca is the extreme case: in 2011, it rejected the Conga project—worth 4.8 billion dollars—with the slogan “Water yes, gold no,” under a governor later convicted of collusion and money laundering; today, it carries a paralyzed mining portfolio of 18 billion soles and is, year after year, the poorest region in the country, with 45% of its population living below the poverty line. There, Sánchez won 66.76%. Apurímac, which did accept the Las Bambas project, saw its poverty rate drop from 70% in 2004 to 24% in 2024. Then they blame Lima, and the local radio stations, bought with state advertising, repeat the myth. It’s not neglect: it’s a choice.

Fujimori governs with three unprecedented assets: a newly bicameral Congress, which makes expedited impeachment more difficult; a party system reduced to six forces; and an approval rating close to 60%. On the other hand, there’s the arithmetic: 22 out of 60 senators and about 41 out of 130 representatives. The first minority, not the majority. His first month has already sent a clear message: the legislative powers he announced on July 28th have still not reached Congress. He cannot afford another month like this.

There is also a dimension that should keep us up at night. The Chancay megaport, inaugurated by Xi Jinping in 2024 and 60% controlled by the state-owned COSCO, is China’s largest logistics asset in the Western Hemisphere; in January, a Lima judge ordered the regulator Ositrán to refrain from auditing it. Washington has responded that its dominance in the hemisphere “will never be questioned.” President José Jerí was impeached in February for concealing meetings with Chinese businesspeople: the geopolitics of the great powers have now entered the Peruvian presidential impeachment process.

In this whole affair—Chancay, Corío, security with the United States—Europe is conspicuously absent. The European Union sent an election observation mission and issued a preliminary statement: that’s all. In the world’s second-largest copper producer, the metal without which there can be no European energy transition, our strategic absence is as conspicuous as it is ruinous.

Vargas Llosa opened *Conversation in the Cathedral* with a question that remains relevant: at what point did Peru go wrong? There wasn’t a single moment: there was an accumulation of resignations. Fujimori has five years and an unprecedented opportunity since 2000. If he merely governs, Peru will return to the same point in 2031 , with the resilient and fanatical hard left waiting its turn and with the reinforced argument of a lack of results. If he truly reforms, he will have achieved what no Peruvian president has in this century. These people don’t tire, they don’t reinvent themselves, and they don’t forgive: they lose by forty thousand votes and return five years later with a different party name but the same program. They’ve already done it three times in a row. The difference between defeating them politically, with the law and the votes in hand, and handing the country over to them is forty thousand votes and 9,000 votes, plus a decision.

*Gustavo de Arístegui is a diplomat and was ambassador to India, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka (2012-2016) gustvodearistegui.substack.com