Alert: Peru’s Far Right Moves to Steal the Second Round Before It Begins

With 94 percent of ballots counted, left-wing congressman Roberto Sánchez holds second place with 12.0 percent of the vote — ahead of far-right former Lima mayor Rafael López Aliaga at 11.9 percent — a margin of roughly 13,000 votes that has gradually widened as returns from rural and interior regions continue to come in. 

The trajectory of that count reflects a clear dynamic: Peru’s popular classes, concentrated outside the capital, are making themselves heard. The far-right has tried to silence them.

Even before election day, López Aliaga had begun making claims of electoral fraud. Reporting by La República revealed that former police intelligence agents working with his Popular Renewal party organized a plan to remove the heads of both the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE) and the National Elections Board (JNE), and replace them with sympathetic officials who would invalidate the election. 

When the count began moving against him, López Aliaga issued an ultimatum: “I am giving them 24 hours to declare this electoral fraud null and void,” threatening to lead a “civil insurgency” if his demands were unmet.

He also offered 20,000 Peruvian soles to individuals who assisted his electoral fraud narrative. The Popular Force party of leading candidate Keiko Fujimori — the daughter and former first lady of Peru’s notorious dictator and former president, Alberto Fujimori — offered its representatives to support López Aliaga’s “fact-finding” effort in a coordinated attempt to block Sánchez from reaching the second round. 

The results under dispute deserve rigorous scrutiny. Roughly 6 percent of polling stations — representing over one million votes — have been challenged due to alleged inconsistencies, missing information, or errors on tally sheets. Most of the disputed precincts are located outside the capital and are the determining factor for the second round. 

The pattern is familiar, following the contours of the previously disputed 2021 presidential elections: contested ballots concentrated in regions with strong Indigenous and peasant movements where popular support for the left is strongest. Electoral observers must examine each challenge on its evidentiary merits.

Similarly to 2021, electoral observers, such as the EU electoral observation mission, have found no supporting evidence for the fraud narrative. 

Peru enters this moment after years of deliberate destabilization — seven presidents in a decade, the imprisonment of former president Pedro Castillo, and the successive failure of governments that chose violent repression over accountability.

The crackdown on demonstrations under Dina Boluarte menaced the very foundations of Peruvian democracy and killed dozens of demonstrators, before she was removed in October 2025. 

The second round scheduled for 7 June 2026 represents a genuine democratic opening, perhaps the most promising and consequential in a generation. The current reactionary effort seeks to foreclose that opening through manufactured procedural chaos to deny the popular will.

Across the hemisphere, from Quito to Brasília to Washington, the far-right deploys the same playbook time and again: delegitimize institutions, ‘flood the zone’ with electoral fraud claims, and then transform logistical failures into pretexts for nullification.

Peru stands at that threshold now. Progressive forces must watch this count with the same intensity they would bring to any direct assault against suffrage — because that is precisely what this is.