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Elections·Disinformation

Peru's left-wing candidate overtakes far-right rival for election runoff spot as fraud claims mount[Updated]

Thursday, 16 April 2026, 06:09 · 1 min read
Updates
6d

Renovación Popular, the party of far-right candidate Rafael López Aliaga, has filed roughly 100 nullification requests targeting 98 polling stations in the northern highland region of Cajamarca, where his rival Roberto Sánchez received 4,116 votes — the majority of ballots cast at those tables. The move echoes Keiko Fujimori's own 2021 effort to annul 200,000 votes spread across 802 polling records from sierra and jungle regions after losing the presidency to Pedro Castillo, a request electoral authorities rejected for lack of any supporting evidence. With 93.3% of records now tallied by ONPE, Fujimori's place in the June 7 runoff has never been in doubt; it is the contest for second place that continues to grip — and divide — the country.

Sources
Original story

With roughly 90% of votes counted in Peru's first-round presidential election, left-wing candidate Roberto Sánchez has climbed from sixth place to second, narrowly overtaking far-right former Lima mayor Rafael López Aliaga and earning a spot in the 7 June runoff against frontrunner Keiko Fujimori, who leads with around 17% of the vote. Sánchez's surge is driven largely by rural ballots — among the last to be tallied by Peru's electoral authority (ONPE) — prompting López Aliaga to allege fraud, call for results to be annulled, and direct a sexual threat at the head of Peru's National Elections Jury (JNE). However, the European Union's Electoral Observation Mission, the public prosecutor's office, and the national ombudsman have all concluded there is no evidence of electoral fraud, with the ombudsman stating there are "no technical or legal grounds to speak of fraud." The episode has exposed deep social divisions, with racially charged attacks circulating online against rural voters who backed Sánchez, while observers note that Peru's slow manual count of remote communities is a structural feature of its electoral system, not an anomaly.

Sources
El PaísLa izquierda se afianza para la segunda vuelta en Perú y la ultraderecha denuncia un fraude ↗︎
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