Analysis: Not knowing who won the election is the least of Peru's problems
The voter does not choose the candidate who most convinces him: he chooses the one who least represents what has already failed. On June 7, Peru once again demonstrated exactly that. On June 21, Colombia is about to do the same.
More than 72 hours after the polls closed in Peru, the country remains without an elected president.
With approximately 98% of the votes counted, Roberto Sánchez, from Juntos por el Perú, maintained an advantage of less than 10 thousand votes over Keiko Fujimori among almost 18 million votes registered, a margin so narrow that electoral authorities warned that the definitive official result could take around a month to be known, after the nullity appeals and contested minutes have been resolved.
The fact that Peru still does not know who its next president will be draws attention. What is most telling, however, is that electoral uncertainty is no longer an exception, but a recurring feature of its political system.
And also that this uncertainty is no longer a Peruvian anomaly: in much of Latin America, elections do not produce legitimacy. They produce more doubts, more questions and leaders who assume power with high rates of rejection.
The repetition that shouldn't happen
In 2021, Fujimori lost to Pedro Castillo by 44,200 votes in a second round that took weeks to be officially certified.
Castillo governed in a chaotic manner, attempted a self-coup in December 2022 and ended up in prison, sentenced to 11 years.
The institutions that succeeded him never had public trust: according to research by the Institute of Peruvian Studies, Peruvians' approval of Congress did not exceed 15% in any measurement carried out between 2023 and 2024.
Five years later, Peru held a first round with 35 candidates - one of the most fragmented elections in its recent history - and produced exactly the same decisive confrontation: Keiko Fujimori against a leftist candidate who was a minister in the Castillo government.
The result was so tight that it immediately reactivated the same allegations of fraud and institutional manipulation seen in 2021.
The question that should be asked is not who won: it is why Peru keeps reaching the same precipice and why its political system is incapable of producing anything that will move it away from it.
The answer is structural. Between 2016 and today, Peru has accumulated eight presidents in a decade, an unprecedented number in its recent history.
The country lives with a Congress that removed or forced the departure of several representatives through constitutional vacancies, and with a Judiciary trapped in the same networks of corruption that it was supposed to combat: the Cuellos Blancos del Puerto scandal, which in 2018 revealed systematic links between judges, prosecutors and members of organized crime, was never effectively resolved in its essence.
The party system is so fragile that 35 candidates were able to run for President without any of them having managed to build a lasting electoral base.
Added to this is a far-reaching institutional transition: the return to bicameralism, with a Chamber of Deputies of 130 members and a Senate of 60.
Governing without a majority will not be an anomaly of the next political cycle, but its starting condition. The new president's ability to negotiate and build consensus will define, before any programmatic agenda, whether the government will be able to maintain itself or end up falling.
The outsider is the system
What unites Peru and Colombia with Argentina, Ecuador and El Salvador is not ideology. It is a relationship between voters and institutions that has collapsed beyond the point where conventional reforms would be able to repair it.
Javier Milei, Daniel Noboa, Nayib Bukele and, now, De la Espriella do not win because voters adopted their programs. Exit polls carried out in Argentina in 2023 and in El Salvador in 2024 pointed in the same direction: the main driver of the vote was not agreement with the candidate's program, but wear and tear in relation to those who came before.
They win because the alternatives - the traditional parties, the established coalitions, the household names - have exhausted their credibility.
The mechanism is consistent. The fragmentation in the first round reflects the impossibility of building broad centrist coalitions. The second round forces a binary choice between two poles that, together, often represent less than the majority of the electorate. The winner comes to power without a mandate strong enough to govern, but with opponents mobilized enough to destabilize him.
The Peruvian case illustrates this with surgical clarity. The winner on June 7, whoever it may be, will face a bicameral Congress without defined majorities, an opposition that is already talking about fraud even before the official result is announced and a country in which no president, since 2016, has completed his term in a regular manner.
Fragility is not an accident of the system. It's your product.
Brazil is, for now, the exception that confirms the rule. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) came to power in 2022 supported by a broad coalition, and the influential center parties in Congress are precisely those that limit more extreme positions when governing.
* Martín Morales is managing partner of Arko USA
Source: CNN