After four attempts spanning fifteen years, Keiko Fujimori has finally won Peru's presidency, becoming the first woman ever elected to the country's highest office. Her victory — by a margin of roughly 50,000 votes out of 18.4 million cast in this Andean nation of 34 million people — makes Peru the latest Latin American country to swing to the right. Yet the narrow result underscores just how divided the country remains, and many observers are openly sceptical that she can deliver on her promise to unite it.
Fujimori, 51, has spent her entire adult life in the shadow of her father, the late Alberto Fujimori, who governed Peru from 1990 to 2000. The elder Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants who rose from mathematics professor to head of state, left a deeply contradictory legacy. He crushed the brutal Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrilla movement, stabilised the economy, and laid the foundations for decades of strong growth driven by Peru's vast mineral wealth in copper, silver, gold, and zinc. But he also dissolved parliament in a 1992 self-coup, presided over death squads and the forced sterilisation of thousands of indigenous women, and ultimately fled to Japan amid a corruption scandal before being extradited, tried, and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He died in September 2024, aged 86, under house arrest at his daughter's home. Her father, analysts note, is simultaneously her greatest political asset and her most serious liability.
Keiko Fujimori's path to power has been marked by her own legal troubles — she spent 16 months in pre-trial detention between 2018 and 2020 on allegations of illegal campaign financing, though she was never convicted — as well as by her role in blocking several governments from the legislature. Peru's political system has been in prolonged crisis: most of her predecessors have ended up imprisoned on charges including corruption, money laundering, or attempting to stage coups. That she has politically outlasted all of them is, by any measure, a remarkable feat.
Her policy platform echoes her father's in several respects: a tough stance on crime, liberal economic policies to attract investment, and spending on education and healthcare. She has also proposed directing 40 percent of mining revenues directly to communities in extraction zones, a recognition that social unrest — a recurring feature of recent Peruvian politics — must be addressed. In a significant diplomatic signal, she has appointed a former official from the United States Embassy as her foreign minister, signalling a pivot towards Washington.
Whether Fujimori can govern effectively after years of wielding congressional power primarily to obstruct is the central question facing Peru. Political analysts point out that her electoral victory was too narrow to claim a broad mandate, and that indigenous and left-leaning communities in the highlands retain deep mistrust of the Fujimori name. The more immediate test, as observers note, may simply be whether she becomes one of the rare recent Peruvian presidents to complete a full term in office.