Approximately 27 million Peruvians cast their votes on Sunday in one of the most fragmented and unpredictable presidential elections in the country's modern history, choosing from a record 35 candidates on a ballot sheet nearly half a metre long — the longest ever produced in Peru. With no candidate polling above 15 percent, analysts widely expect the race to go to a second round on 7 June, though almost no one can say with confidence who the two finalists will be.
The election comes after a decade of chronic political turbulence that has produced nine presidents, four impeachments, and a string of corruption scandals — most notably involving Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction giant at the centre of a continent-wide bribery network that has seen four former Peruvian presidents jailed. The most recent head of state took office only in February; his predecessor lasted just four months. Against this backdrop, crime has dominated the campaign: homicide rates have more than doubled since 2018, rising from around 1,000 killings to over 2,200 in 2025, while extortion complaints have surged 43 percent over five years. Proposals to tackle insecurity have been correspondingly drastic — ranging from a mega-prison modelled on El Salvador's notorious CECOT facility, to the death penalty for contract killers, to jailing criminals in remote Amazon prisons guarded, one candidate proposed, by snakes.
The frontrunner in opinion polls is Keiko Fujimori, 50, a right-wing politician making her fourth consecutive presidential bid after narrow losses in 2011, 2016 and 2021. The daughter of late autocratic president Alberto Fujimori — who was convicted of corruption and human rights abuses — she has proposed nationwide surveillance systems and the revival of "faceless judges," anonymous magistrates used during her father's government whose convictions were largely overturned for failing to guarantee fair trials. Hot on her heels is Carlos Álvarez, a comedian who has spent three decades impersonating Peruvian presidents and now campaigns in earnest, citing Donald Trump and El Salvador's Nayib Bukele as inspirations. Also competitive are Rafael López Aliaga, an ultra-conservative rail magnate whose hard-right campaign has drawn accusations of disinformation and hate speech, and Ricardo Belmont, the 80-year-old former mayor of Lima whose upbeat slogan — "hugs not bullets" — and social media popularity have attracted younger voters, despite a record of xenophobic and sexist remarks. Several candidates, including Belmont, have pledged to pardon jailed former president Pedro Castillo, the populist leader removed from office in 2022 after a failed self-coup attempt.
Political scientists describe the campaign as chaotic and dispiriting. Eduardo Dargent, a political science professor at Peru's Pontifical Catholic University, noted that the sheer number of candidates — many of whom never made a single public appearance — created confusion and drowned out substantive debate. Key issues such as public health, education and the economy received almost no serious attention. Around 16 percent of voters remained undecided in the final Ipsos poll, with 11 percent considering a blank or spoiled ballot.
Why this matters: Peru's instability has eroded trust in democratic institutions to a critical degree. A generation of young voters who took to the streets in protests in late 2025 that ultimately brought down former president Dina Boluarte has largely disengaged from formal politics, with no party earning their collective backing. "No political leader has emerged who can generate a sense of hope," said pollster Urpi Torrado of Datum Internacional. For many Peruvians, the deepest fear is not who wins on Sunday, but whether any winner will last long enough to matter.