Fujimori Leads Peru Presidential Vote in Tight Race

Peru’s conservative presidential candidate, Keiko Fujimori, is locked in a tight race against her progressive rival in a runoff election, with results on June 8 indicating the contest is still too close to call.

Fujimori, the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, is facing congressman Roberto Sánchez in a runoff dominated by the themes of crime, inequality, mining, and Peru’s deep urban-rural divide.

As of June 8, the live second-round results page from Peru’s official election authority, ONPE, showed that Fujimori was leading Sánchez by just over 50 percent to 49.8 percent, with almost 93 percent of tally sheets counted.

ONPE said a full count would be completed by mid-July.

Speaking from a Lima hotel on June 7, Fujimori called on supporters to remain calm and said there would be “long days ahead before we know the final result.”

Sánchez has run on a left-wing reform platform to reform the mining sector, which accounts for nearly 12 percent of GDP in Peru, a major global supplier of copper, gold, and silver.

“Thirty years of mining and the mining towns ​are still the poorest in our country,” Sánchez told Reuters on June 5.

Keiko Fujimori’s father, Alberto Fujimori, was a Japanese Peruvian politician who served as president of Peru from 1990 to 2000.

Supporters credit him with crushing the Maoist Shining Path insurgency and stabilizing the country, while critics point to his authoritarian rule and human rights abuses.

He was convicted in 2009 and sentenced to 25 years in prison over human rights abuses, including responsibility for the murder of 25 people by a death squad, as well as corruption-related charges.

He was not found to have personally ordered the 25 death-squad killings for which he was convicted, but he was deemed responsible because the crimes were committed in his government’s name.

He was released in 2023 after a pardon was reinstated, and he died the following year at the age of 86.

Keiko Fujimori is riding a conservative wave that is sweeping Latin America, with recent elections in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica, and potentially Colombia.

Argentina elected self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei in 2023 on a chainsaw-wielding promise to slash the state, while Ecuador’s center-right President Daniel Noboa won reelection in April this year on a tough-on-crime platform.

Chile elected conservative José Antonio Kast in 2025 against a communist candidate, in the same year that Bolivia’s election ended two decades of socialist dominance.

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump endorsed conservative Colombian presidential candidate Abelardo ​de la Espriella, who will face progressive senator Ivan Cepeda in a runoff election this month.

“The results of this election are very important to the future of ​Colombia and its relationship to the United States,” Trump wrote in a June 3 post on Truth Social.

Trump called Cepeda a “Radical Left Marxist.”

De ‌la Espriella has promised ⁠to build 10 mega-prisons, drawing comparisons to Salvadoran President Nayib ⁠Bukele.

Under Bukele, El Salvador has rounded up alleged gang members, including those belonging to the notorious MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) gang, and put many of them in a 40,000-inmate mega-prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.