After long deliberation, the people of Peru have finally chosen a new national leader. Following four presidential bids, Keiko Fujimori, the standard-bearer of Fujimorismo, has at last ascended to power. Her final runoff vote share was 50.135 percent. It was an extremely tight contest, in which she edged out the opposition's candidate Roberto Sanchez, who recorded 49.865 percent, by a mere 0.27 percentage points, or a margin of only about 49,000 votes. With this, Keiko Fujimori will begin her inauguration on the 28th and lead Peru's executive branch for the next five years.
Yet the road ahead for President-elect Keiko Fujimori, who seized victory, will not be smooth. Securing the stability of the governing foundation on which she has set foot has emerged as an immediate task. The defeated opposition candidate's side is demanding a precise verification of the electoral process, heightening political tension. Due to the razor-thin margin, the president-elect carries a considerable burden in achieving broad national unity.
The results of this presidential election faithfully reflect the structural polarization of Peruvian society. Farmers in the high Andes and marginalized indigenous people gave overwhelming support to the opposition candidate. But major urban areas, including the capital Lima, concentrated their votes on candidate Keiko. Suturing a social reality in which geographic and class divisions have deepened is the first test facing the new government.
The essential question we should focus on lies elsewhere. Why does Peru's presidential election repeat such extreme confrontation and post-electoral turmoil every time, and why does the strange delay recur in which the official count is not completed until a full 22 days after the election ends? Behind these phenomena lies a structural paradox inherent in Peru's political system. This is not merely the political situation of a distant country; it also offers highly important empirical implications for Korea's political circles and academia, which are contemplating reforms to democratic institutions.
Behind the way Peruvian elections always converge into extreme battles lies an institutional characteristic of the "runoff system." Amid extreme fragmentation, with more than 30 candidates crowding the first round of voting, the combined first-round vote share of the top two candidates who advanced to the runoff was only around 30 percent. Once candidates who had failed to secure the firm support of the majority of voters advanced to the runoff, a strategic alliance of centrist forces seeking to check the rival camp's rise to power was hastily formed for the main contest.
In the end, voters were forced into a choice of the next best or lesser of two evils rather than active support. While there are voices arguing for the introduction of a runoff system to prevent domination by two giant parties and to establish a multi-party system, Peru's case is an excellent counterexample showing that this system may instead encourage a proliferation of candidates and weaken the winner's political legitimacy even before inauguration.
The bigger problem is that with the end of the presidential election, this strategic alliance may disintegrate early, presenting a bill in the form of demands for a share of power. Partners who colluded for victory begin to demand a share of the executive branch and pressure the ruler both inside and outside the parliament. The structural vulnerability of Peruvian politics that this writer witnessed on the ground begins precisely here. Ministerial posts distributed to each party risk undermining the executive branch's consistent governing discipline. When ministers appointed in this way come to represent the interests of their affiliated parties before serving as cabinet members responsible for state affairs, a deformed political landscape unfolds in which the command authority of the president, the head of state, cannot function properly.
There are also internal factors that constrain the president-elect's grip on governance. It is the fact that Keiko Fujimori has not fully unified even the party she leads. Unlike the past, when she controlled the party with powerful charisma, the party now contains multiple factions divided along lines of interest, each raising its own voice. If the ruling party, which must defend against the opposition's offensive and the centrist coalition's demands, fends for itself due to weakened internal cohesion, the new president's leadership will face fierce challenges both inside and out.
The parliament's institutional means to check the executive branch's policy drive are also powerful. A representative example is the impeachment system under the pretext of "moral incapacity" (Incapacidad Moral), the weakest link in Peru's constitution and one carrying ambiguity of interpretation. The parliament has expansively interpreted a president's political missteps or flaws as moral incapacity, using the impeachment system as a tool for political offensives. A president with a ruling party of weak internal cohesion is left defenseless against the opposition's offensive, and this is the essential reason why a cruel constitutional history repeats itself, in which a president is suspended from office within a short period based solely on the numerical logic of seat counts, without clear judicial proof of charges. It is a precious constitutional-law case showing how a system becomes paralyzed when the line of checks and balances is not precisely drawn in the design of the power structure.
This structural delay carries over intact into electoral administration as well. In this presidential election, too, the official declaration of the winner by the National Jury of Elections (JNE) came only on the 3rd, a full 22 days after voting closed. The reality that an entire nation is placed in an administrative vacuum for more than three weeks in a cutting-edge digital age is the result of logistical limitations arising from Peru's rugged geographic characteristics and a pre-modern structure for reviewing objections.
Furthermore, the fact that the presidential inauguration takes place immediately on July 28, just 25 days after the official declaration of the winner, is a highly fatal institutional blind spot. It is far too little time to take over a massive state administrative apparatus, grasp state affairs, organize a reform agenda, and set a new direction for governance. Even verifying and aligning the essential personnel to fill the cabinet and the presidential palace is nearly impossible. As delays in electoral administration erode the transition deadline, the new president is driven onto a rough battlefield of political strife from the first day of the term, without even the leisure to build a systematic roadmap. This is a passage that sounds an alarm about how important the "coherence of the timeline" during a transition of power is from an administrative-science perspective.
All of these crises of Peruvian politics that this writer witnessed are by no means the deviations of specific individuals, but largely stem from "insufficient institutional readiness." From an election law that encourages fragmentation in the first round, to a party system that induces short-term coalitions, to electoral administration that paralyzes the transition of power, and to constitutional provisions that condone parliament's abuse of impeachment, Peru's democratic institutions carry structural contradictions that, rather than promoting national stability, instead amplify political instability.
This is also why the parliament and political elites holding vested interests are passive about institutional reform. In Peru's media and academia, whenever the presidential season arrives, the deformed party politics of fielding candidates who rely only on financial power and name recognition, without ideological identity or a membership base, is criticized with the self-deprecating term "surrogate womb" (Vientre de alquiler). Within a party structure reduced to a platform for short-term seizures of power, for lawmakers who have grasped power, making the electoral system transparent or tightening impeachment requirements may be seen as an act of self-limiting their own political influence. Reflecting on the history of Korean party politics, which repeats coalitions, mergers, and party splits every election season, one deeply realizes how central the institutionalization of the party system is to the consolidation of democracy.
Recently, in order to check the parliament's unilateral run and its easy abuse of impeachment, a major institutional operation of returning to a Senate system (bicameralism) was undertaken, but whether this too can meet expectations is thoroughly uncertain. There is optimism that the Senate will serve as a buffer zone to calm the partisan excitement of the lower house, but conversely, if both the upper and lower houses are seized by the opposition, the executive branch may be isolated amid the dual checks and pressure of both chambers, and governance may be completely paralyzed. In the end, even if the outer shell of the institution is changed, if the behavior and politics of the political elites who operate it do not change, the new institution will merely become another constraint that makes governance more difficult.
The conclusion is self-evident. Even though Keiko Fujimori has seized the presidential victory she so ardently longed for, the political environment awaiting her is by no means easy. Amid structural conditions in which it is difficult for the president-elect to conduct governance stably, she has no choice but to carry out "politics of cooperation and compromise" that will be nerve-wracking at every moment. The essence of the pain Peru is experiencing today is not the absence of a leader. A responsible party system to support the president's governance, a predictable [truncated in original]
