Who seeks to reach the Mayor’s Office of Lima? Parties waited until the last day to register their candidates

Although the page has not yet been turned with respect to the general elections, the Regional and Municipal Elections 2026 (ERM 2026) has already started its own countdown. At 11:59 pm yesterday – Friday, June 19 – the deadline for political groups to formally request the registration of their lists of candidates for governors, mayors and other authorities who will participate in this contest, scheduled for next October 4, closed. However, the habit of waiting until the last minute prevailed again.

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Of the more than 14,400 lists that were estimated nationwide, at 9 pm only 67.97% (about 9,800) had been registered, according to the platform of the National Elections Jury (JNE). In the case of Metropolitan Lima, where the next municipal authority will replace Renzo Reggiardo, the progress was even smaller and barely reached 38.10% at the same time. And, at press time, only 20 lists had been registered.

All of this occurs despite the fact that the deadline initially expired on June 16 and that, given the large number of political organizations that had not yet completed the process, it was extended in an extraordinary manner for an additional 72 hours.

“The deadline expired on the 16th. (…) What we decided, considering that there were still a large number of political organizations and unregistered lists, is to extend three days. There are 72 hours that we have established, I think it is a very prudent deadline so that any difficulty, anything, can be overcome,” said the president of the JNE, Roberto Burneo, this Friday.

in the splitter

The first candidate to present his application to participate in the race was Carlos Bruce, former minister and current mayor of Surco, who, since there is no reelection option at the level, seeks to make the leap to the Mayor of Lima with Somos Perú. He did it on June 17.

After Bruce, the lawyer Santiago Abarca León, for Visión Perú, and the engineer Elizabeth León Chinchay, who is applying again with the Frente de la Esperanza, also presented their applications. The next day, Sandro Caller registered for the Patriotic Party of Peru (PPP), who in the previous elections ran for mayor of Villa El Salvador for the same group.

A total of 13,148 popularly elected positions will be in dispute in the Regional and Municipal Elections of 2026. Citizens will go to the polls to elect regional governors and vice-governors, regional councillors, provincial and district mayors, as well as councillors.

During the last day of the deadline, Francis Allison (Avanza País), current mayor of Magdalena del Mar, a position to which he was elected for the fifth time, presented their applications; and Susel Paredes, who this July will conclude the 2021-2026 congressional five-year period and is running for the capital commune with Ahora Nación.

Edgardo de Pomar, former mayor of Lima and former general manager of the Urban Transportation Authority for Lima and Callao (ATU), competes for the Popular Christian Party (PPC). Meanwhile, Podemos Peru is betting on former minister Daniel Urresti, released last March after the Constitutional Court annulled the sentence imposed against him for the Hugo Bustíos Case.

On the other hand, Renovación Popular presents the doctor Luis Rubio Idrogo, president of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Solidarity System (SISOL) and founder of the solidarity hospitals. After choosing not to take office as senator, Rafael López Aliaga accompanies him as a candidate for deputy mayor.

What’s coming and the challenges for the next mayor

As explained to The Commerce José Tello, president of the AKLLA Peru Institute, the files presented by the groups, whether virtually or in person until the deadline, must go through a qualification stage by the Special Electoral Juries (JEE), the bodies in charge of providing electoral justice in the first instance. If they meet the requirements, they will advance to the next stage.

According to information from the JNE, August 5 is the deadline for the JEE, once the corresponding verifications have been made, to publish the formulas and lists of admitted candidates. Likewise, August 20 is the deadline for the blemishes to be resolved in the first instance, while until September 4 they can be reviewed, in case of appeal, by the plenary session of the JNE.

Tello specified that those new parties that did not participate in the general elections and manage to present candidacies in nine regional governments and 40 provinces will maintain their registration in force. However, he warned that an important group of groups that participated in the general elections and did not overcome the electoral hurdle will lose their registration regardless of how many authorities they manage to elect.

“There are two groups that are going to lose registration. Those who are already dead, who no matter what they do now in the ERM, will lose their registration for not having passed the cancellation hurdle. And the new ones who are presenting themselves for this election, who do not comply with presenting 9 candidates for regional governments and 40 provincial municipalities”Tello said.

For former Minister of the Interior Carlos Basombrío, the main challenge that the next mayor of Lima will face will be citizen insecurity. He pointed out that the capital concentrates the highest levels of criminal violence in the country and that, beyond the formal powers of each institution, citizens will demand concrete responses from the municipal authority.

“Lima has become the province where the highest concentration of criminal violence occurs in the entire country”he warned.

Basombrío considered that, although the direct fight against crime corresponds to the National Police, citizen pressure will also fall on whoever assumes leadership of the metropolitan commune. In this context, he estimated that he should strengthen coordination mechanisms with law enforcement and develop complementary actions.

For his part, in the view of political analyst Enrique Castillo, the next mayor of Lima will have four priority challenges: clean up the finances of the Metropolitan Municipality of Lima, reinforce the fight against citizen insecurity in coordination with the Central Government, confront the traffic problems that affect the capital and expand access to basic services in peripheral areas.

“These are the main and most important issues that anyone who reaches the municipality has to resolve,” he remarked.

Castillo highlighted that regional and municipal elections usually develop with their own dynamics, regardless of national politics and the performance of the Central Government. Along these lines, he ruled out that the presidential result necessarily conditions the dispute for the Mayor of Lima in October.

“The Lima election is always an election that is absolutely detached from the issue of the Executive and national politics,” he noted. Under that logic, nothing is ruled out.