Peru's conservative presidential candidate Rafael López Aliaga has called for Sunday's general election to be declared "null and void", alleging the vote was rigged — a claim made without evidence and rejected by international observers. The demand came as a slow-moving vote count dramatically reshuffled the race for second place, threatening López Aliaga's position in a June runoff.

With 85% of votes counted, Keiko Fujimori — daughter of imprisoned former president Alberto Fujimori and leader of the right-wing Fuerza Popular party — secured the top spot with around 16.8% of the vote, enough to comfortably lead a field of 35 candidates. The contest for the crucial second runoff place, however, remains razor-thin. López Aliaga, of the ultraconservative Renovación Popular party, holds 12.2%, but he is being rapidly chased down by left-wing candidate Roberto Sánchez of Juntos por el Perú, who has climbed from sixth to third place — rising more than three percentage points since Monday — and now sits fewer than 100,000 votes behind him.

The surge by Sánchez reflects a well-established pattern in Peruvian elections: rural and highland communities, whose ballots are counted later in the process because polling stations report results in order of arrival, tend to favour left-wing candidates over Lima's conservative establishment. Sánchez ran a campaign deliberately evoking the legacy of jailed former president Pedro Castillo — who was imprisoned after a failed self-coup in December 2022 — even wearing a wide-brimmed hat gifted to him by Castillo during a prison visit and promising to pardon him if elected. Analysts note that for many rural voters, Castillo's downfall is seen not as a democratic correction but as an elite-engineered removal.

López Aliaga organised a protest outside Peru's National Elections Jury (JNE), the country's electoral authority, claiming the vote was being stolen. Yet the European Union Election Observation Mission, which deployed 150 monitors across the country, stated that it had found no evidence of fraud. "Not enough elements have reached the mission to say that the fraud narrative has any basis," said mission chief Annalisa Corrado, though she acknowledged there had been "serious problems" — including delays in opening polling stations that forced voting to be extended into Monday.

The episode highlights how deeply distrust has corroded Peru's political landscape. Research from the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos shows that roughly eight in ten Peruvians believe electoral fraud is possible. The count's structure — which initially advantages candidates strong in large cities like López Aliaga in Lima before rural tallies arrive — creates what one analyst called "false expectations," with some candidates appearing to surge only as more remote results are processed. Sánchez himself responded pointedly to his rival's accusations: "Just because it involves the popular movement and the highland zones, it has to be fraud. Show the evidence. No vote is worth more than another."