LIMA, Peru — After final vote tallies were certified Friday, Peru has locked in its two candidates for the June 7 presidential runoff election, pitting a scion of one of the country’s most powerful political families against a nationalist former trade minister who has vowed to upend Peru’s long-standing mining policy. This runoff will shape the future of a nation that has seen eight presidents in just a decade, grappling with widespread public anger over crime and corruption even as its resource-driven economy holds strong against chronic political instability.
Final official results from the April 12 first-round vote confirm that conservative Keiko Fujimori, leader of the Fuerza Popular party and daughter of disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori, secured first place with 17.18% of the vote. Trailing narrowly at 12.03% was nationalist congressman Roberto Sánchez of the Juntos por el Perú party, who edged out 33 other contenders to claim the second runoff spot. Both candidates have centered their campaigns on addressing Peru’s skyrocketing violent crime rate, which ranks as the top concern for most Peruvian voters.
The first-round election was marred by widespread logistical failures, including widespread ballot shortages that left thousands of eligible voters both in Peru and overseas unable to cast their ballots on election Sunday. Authorities responded by extending voting for more than 52,000 Lima voters on Monday, as well as for Peruvian citizens registered in two U.S. voting locations: Orlando, Florida, and Paterson, New Jersey. Ballot access issues have already spurred an official investigation, with police raiding the former election chief’s home and a Peruvian court setting a mid-May deadline for the completion of official vote counting.
The election unfolded against a backdrop of soaring violent crime and persistent corruption scandals that have left most Peruvian voters deeply disillusioned, with widespread public distrust of nearly all candidates’ integrity and preparedness to lead. In response to voter anger, dozens of first-round candidates put forward hardline crime proposals, including plans for mega-sized prisons, restricted inmate meals, and a return of the death penalty for serious offenses.
Against this turbulent political landscape, Peru’s economy has emerged as an unexpected bright spot. As the world’s second-largest copper producer, the country has posted consistent 3% annual growth across 2024 and 2025, defying predictions that the constant turnover of presidents—three have held office since October alone—would derail economic performance. The mining sector that drives this growth is now one of the biggest points of contention between the two runoff candidates.
The upcoming June contest echoes Peru’s 2021 presidential runoff, which also featured Fujimori as a candidate. That year, she faced off against rural schoolteacher and political outsider Pedro Castillo, whom Sánchez has openly supported and even emulates by wearing Castillo’s signature wide-brimmed campaign hat. Castillo defeated Fujimori by a narrow margin of roughly 42,000 votes, fueled by overwhelming support from low-income rural communities, but his presidency ended in impeachment and arrest in December 2022 after he attempted to dissolve Congress to block an impeachment vote.
This marks Fujimori’s fourth run for the presidency. She has run on a promise of a hardline crackdown on rising crime, but her record is contradictory: her party supported legislation in recent years that legal experts say undermines criminal prosecutions, including measures that eliminated preliminary detention for certain offenses and raised the legal bar for seizing assets tied to organized crime. Sánchez has pledged to repeal these same laws, while also promising to strengthen police intelligence units to combat extortion, a crime that has increased fivefold across Peru in the last five years.
On economic policy, Sánchez has broken with the market-friendly policies that have defined Peru for the last two decades. His core proposal is a sweeping overhaul of the country’s mining sector: he has promised to renegotiate existing contracts with foreign mining firms to increase state tax revenues, grant rural indigenous communities partial ownership stakes in mines operating on their land, and ban harmful open-pit mining operations. Political analysts note these reforms face steep odds, however, as Sánchez’s party does not currently hold a majority in congress.
Will Freeman, a Latin America Studies fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted that Fujimori holds a key structural advantage: she is one of Peru’s only remaining national career politicians, heading the country’s only enduring political organization with a full nationwide infrastructure. Freeman argued this structure could help her deliver on crime policy, but that her track record suggests any crackdown would be inconsistent. He pointed to the irony of Fujimori’s history: in the 2010s, her party supported anti-organized crime legislation that prosecutors later used to open corruption investigations against Fujimori herself, leading the party to roll back many of those same anti-crime measures in subsequent years.
The winner of the June 7 runoff will be sworn in for a five-year presidential term on July 28.