The headline “Fujimori Wins in Peru” might leave some readers wondering which decade they’ve woken into, but the Fujimori in this case is daughter Keiko rather than father Alberto.
Conservative candidate Keiko Fujimori, age 51, appears to have won election for the Presidency of Peru. She leads her left-wing opponent by around 50,000 votes, out of more than 18 million cast…
Reuters reports,
Keiko Fujimori’s expected victory returns divisive dynasty to Peru
I had mentioned before that Fujimori’s 2026 victory margin is larger than either of her election defeats in 2016 or 2021. But, somehow, it’s her victory that’s divisive. Her narrow defeats are merely democracy at work.
As Reuters frames it,
Fujimori will become Peru’s first elected female president. Her win follows three previous failed bids — in 2011, 2016 and 2021 — each decided by narrow margins and shaped in part by a persistent “anti-Fujimori” vote that has defined the country’s elections for years.
Get this,
Fujimori takes over from Jose Balcazar, who assumed office earlier this year after Congress removed his predecessor over a scandal involving undisclosed meetings with a Chinese businessman.
So “divisive” is seen as being worse than outright corruption.
Keiko’s father Alberto Fujimori was “divisive” because he revived Peru’s economy and destroyed the Maoist Shining Path guerillas while being a non-leftist. Faced with political deadlock against corrupt parties on both the left and right, he launched an autogolpe, or self-coup, in which he assumed dictatorial power with the backing of the military. But the autogolpe was widely popular with the majority of Peruvians, and Papi Fujimori used that power to crush Shining Path and institute free market reforms in the economy, then returned the country to democracy, winning reelection in 1995 with 2/3rds of the vote.
In the end, he too fell into Peru’s long history of authoritarian strongman habits, with the usual abuse of power, corruption, and human rights abuses. He won a third term in a scandal-plagued election in 2000, but ended up fleeing the country before he could be arrested. And despite that, he was still arguably the most successful (and important) President in Peru’s troubled history.
The problem is, just about every Peruvian president has either been impeached for corruption, been ousted in a coup, ruled for a time as a dictator, or ate a bullet, as you can see perusing the Wikipedia list of Peruvian presidents. And you can’t trust that list, since Dina Boluarte is listed as an “independent” rather than on the left, but she was actually a Marxist, as was immediate predecessor Pedro Castillo, whose own autogolpe failed.
Faced with such a long history of corruption and dysfunction, much of it carried out by lefties or Marxists (in South America, the difference can be thin to non-existent), the Alberto Fujimori era now looks like something of a golden age for Peru. No wonder they’re willing to elect Keiko Fujimori, much like Filipinos were willing to elect Bongbong Marcos there…
Tags: 2026 Election, Alberto Fujimori, Dina Boluarte, Elections, Foreign Policy, Jose Balcazar, Keiko Fujimori, Pedro Castillo, Peru, Powerline