A poster of Keiko Fujimori thrown on the ground and turned into a carpet trampled by some of those heading to Roberto Sánchez’s end-of-campaign rally is a graphic example of anti-Fujimorism, one of the forces that is driving the leftist candidate in the second round. The other is thousands of kilometers from Lima, in the southern Andean provinces, one of the most impoverished and excluded areas of Peru.
In a country where traditional parties have been crumbling in recent decades, anti-Fujimorism is often described as the most persistent political movement in Peru, a current capable of altering the outcome of an election at the last moment. This has happened each time that Keiko Fujimori, who upholds the legacy of her father, the autocrat Alberto Fujimorihas contested the presidency since 2011. It has no visible leaders or an organic structure. It is, rather, a force that is reactivated every time Fujimori seems to be close to power.
The movement, very diverse and transversal, has also changed over time. It was born as a frontal rejection of Alberto Fujimori’s regime and the wounds left by his government in terms of human rights violations and corruption, but over the years Keiko Fujimori built her own resistance. Mainly for his leadership at the head of Fuerza Popular, a political group accused of causing a cycle of instability that has lasted for a decade.
This is the first presidential election in which anti-Fujimorism competes without the presence of the man who gave rise to it: Alberto Fujimori died in 2024 and, in recent weeks, many wondered if that political force was still alive. Except for some isolated protests, large mobilizations did not appear. Perhaps because the most recent memory is no longer the nineties, but the fifty protesters who They died in the repression of protests during the government of Dina Boluarte at the hands of law enforcement, in cases that still remain frozen in the Prosecutor’s Office, unpunished, without culprits.
“Anti-Fujimorism has been a strong movement until recently, and in this second round there is a resurgence,” explains left-wing political scientist Román Heli Paredes. “It is a very diverse political space, with liberals, progressives and people further to the left, who suffered a strong division on December 7, 2022,” he states. That day, Pedro Castillo dissolved Congress and was then arrested for trying to carry out a self-coup and sentenced to 11 years and five months in prison for conspiracy. A part of the anti-Fujimorism did not support Castillo, as does the current presidential candidate Roberto Sánchez, who has requested a pardon for him and who is trying to to attract the vote of those who believe that Castillo suffered systematic obstruction of Congress, dominated by Fujimorism and the extreme right, and was prevented from governing. In his opinion, he has now reactivated himself in the campaign and on social networks “united by the idea that the greatest evil is Fujimori in power.”
“It is a shame that the daughter of a dictator runs for president. This only happens in Peru,” says Paola Gaytuiro, a girl in her thirties. She has come with her mother to Roberto Sánchez’s closing rally. None voted for him in the first round. Rather, they voted for Alfonso López Chau, the candidate of Ahora Nación. But the second round, they say, stopped being a choice between two projects and became a decision against a single person. “Whoever will pass will pass we were going to vote against Keiko. She is worse than her father. We are not going to forget all the evil they have caused. If she were president she would violate all our rights,” says Gladys Mayaute, the mother.
Estéfano Añanga has crossed the city from the San Martín de Porres district to Jesús María to accompany Sánchez’s farewell. He is 17 years old and, as a minor, will not be able to vote this Sunday, but he says he is well aware of what Fujimori represents. “My generation is just beginning to realize the atrocities that Alberto Fujimori committed during his dictatorship. And that is why we need quality education so as not to forget the massacres he committed,” he says. A few meters away is Scott Ojeda, a 32-year-old young man, who is annoyed that youth is underestimated. “The information is within reach of a podcast. And although the media sells us one thing, we all know who is who,” he questions. Ojeda did not vote for Sánchez on April 12 either, but he will do so on June 7.
In Lima, Roberto Sánchez came in ninth place in the first round. He obtained only 3.2% of the votes, a total of 199,439. The comparison with Keiko Fujimori is overwhelming in the capital: she came second, with 17.9%, equivalent to 1,089,534 votes. Aware of this disadvantage, the leader of Together for Peru reoriented his campaign for the second round towards the capital, a territory historically elusive for the left and decisive for any presidential aspiration.
The power of the south
Since the return of democracy, and with the exception of 2006, the candidate on whom southern Andean regions such as Puno, Cusco, Ayacucho, Apurímac and Huancavelica opted ended up reaching the Government Palace. It is not a statistical coincidence, but the expression of a country that has historically felt that power is concentrated too far from its territory.
The southern Andean region opted at different times for Alejandro Toledo, Ollanta Humala, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and Pedro Castillo. Except for Kuczynski, the others shared an identity linked to the Andean world. Toledo presented himself as the reincarnation of the Inca Pachacutec, Humala came to power wrapped in a nationalist discourse and Castillo was a rural teacher who campaigned with a straw hat. Or, as many in the mountain towns repeated, he was simply one of their own.
Political scientist Paulo Vilca maintains that although the south is often stigmatized as communist, in reality a large part of its inhabitants define their vote by their anti-centralism. “The majority vote that has been expressed on different occasions from the south is a vote more for change than for the left,” he says. Three of the seven poorest regions in Peru, with an incidence between 35.7% and 39.8%—according to the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics—are located in the south: Huancavelica, Ayacucho and Puno.
A study by the Institute of Peruvian Studies, based on hundreds of public statements between 2001 and 2025, concludes that the Andean south is usually presented as “a threat, a space without political autonomy or a region that needs to be protected from the center of power.” Under this perspective, their demands cease to be citizen demands and become suspicions of radicalism.
“What if the problem is not how the south votes, but how you look south from Lima?“, he asks Regional Pulsemagazine of the Association for Human Rights “This is not an abstract ideological adhesion, but rather a way of understanding justice, power and the common good. And it is linked to the needs of constantly marginalized peoples,” says Miguel Tapia Salas, cultural manager of Apurímac.
In the first round, Roberto Sánchez placed first in the five regions of the southern Andean region. Keiko Fujimori did not go beyond fourth place and in some regions, such as Puno, she came in eighth, with just 3.9% (25 thousand votes). The southern vote has become the other great force that has historically contained Fujimorism. While anti-Fujimorism was born from the rejection of a Government, the southern Andean region seems to vote against a way of understanding the country, one where decisions continue to be made from Lima and the regions are only taken into account when there are protests.
