Fujimorismo is back.
Following three consecutive runoff losses (2011, 2016 and 2021) and a combined 34.5 million votes stacked against her across four election cycles — a phenomenon that made “anti-Fujimorismo” the central axis of recent electoral politics in Peru — Keiko Fujimori has seized the presidency. Securing 50.13% of the vote to narrowly defeat nationalist-populist candidate Roberto Sánchez by fewer than 50,000 ballots, she has become the first woman elected to the office.
The final result was decided in a tense count that ultimately came down to the overseas vote. The election of the daughter of the late Alberto Fujimori — president, dictator and convicted human rights violator — brings, front and center, old and new questions about Peru’s democratic values and endurance in a hemispheric age of increasingly authoritarian hybrid regimes. Widely viewed as a chief architect of the political crisis that has engulfed Peru since President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s 2018 resignation — and having spent over a year in pretrial detention during money-laundering investigations — Keiko now vows to rescue the nation from a sinkhole that she and her father’s legacy played no small part in creating.
As Keiko Fujimori’s administration begins, the road ahead reveals clear continuities regarding the core “values” of Fujimorismo. However, significant questions remain about the political opposition she will face — not only from within a divided bicameral Congress, but also from grassroots social movements and civil society organizations that feel entirely unrepresented by her narrow election victory.
The dirst Cabinet
Keiko’s initial Cabinet appointments offer clear clues about the early posture of her administration. Key ministerial posts have been assigned to figures instrumental in resurrecting Fujimorismo after Fujimori’s authoritarian collapse, as well as core architects of Fuerza Popular (Popular Force ) — the powerful electoral apparatus that sustained her political project. Prime Minister Luis Galarreta, once an aggressive critic of Fujimorismo before becoming a high-profile symbol of transfuguismo , the abrupt change of political positions that brought dozens of former political rivals into the core structures of Fujimorismo through dubious and often illegal mechanisms, now heads the Cabinet. Retired Army Gen. César Astudillo, former Joint Armed Forces chief previously ensnared in the unresolved military fuel-trafficking scandal known as the gasolinazo , takes the Interior Ministry to oversee hard-line anti-crime measures.
The Cabinet also features Opus Dei hyperconservative critic of human rights Rafael Rey and José Antonio Chang, a former minister under President Alan García, who returns to the Education Ministry despite past corruption allegations tied to his tenure at a private neoliberal university and in public office. With only two women appointed to ministerial roles, Keiko’s team signals a combination of partisan discipline, repressive policing, religious orthodoxy, criminal acumen, and a tight consolidation of power within her political inner circle.
The road ahead reveals clear continuities regarding the core “values” of Fujimorismo.
Her first words to the country also left observers with the same conclusion. Keiko’s first presidential address, delivered on July 28, set a peculiar stage that promptly renewed one of Fujimorismo’s favorite practices: historical amnesia. Operating under the motto “ ni un día más” (not one day more) and fully aware of her father’s autocratic, unconstitutional legacy, Keiko framed her election as a strict five-year mandate. Over these 1,826 days, she proposes an agenda of “national reconciliation” designed to unite political opponents, regional governments and social movements. This challenge, she argues, is compounded by a state paralyzed by corruption, inefficiency and bureaucratic hurdles.
Political observers have rightly pointed out, however, that her diagnosis of Peru’s crisis — and her vision for reconciliation — conspicuously omits any reckoning with her or her party’s role in creating this turmoil. Although Fuerza 2011, the original name of her electoral platform, held only a minority share of seats before 2016, that year’s election granted Keiko 73 seats. This 56% majority yielded legislative control that drove Kuczynski to resign under repeated impeachment threats and laid the groundwork for the parliamentary autocracy that ultimately shattered Peru’s institutional order. All of this unfolded while numerous Fuerza Popular lawmakers faced criminal investigations, ranging from individual corruption cases such as those involving Yesenia Ponce, Modesto Figueroa and Betty Ananculí to systemic scandals like Cuellos Blancos del Puerto and the infamous Caso Cócteles money-laundering scheme for which Keiko confronted preventive imprisonment in 2018 and 2020.
The return of “mano dura”
Much like her father, who leveraged Peru’s blended 20th-century crises of hyperinflation and political violence to impose mano dura policies and normalize everyday authoritarian policing, Keiko views the contemporary crime wave as her own opportunity to pivot toward hard-line governance. Echoing measures that once brought Peruvian democracy to the brink of collapse, Keiko announced imminent states of emergency across Lima and other provinces targeted by extortion syndicates and other forms of everyday criminality, once again empowering the military to assume control of internal order.
This strategy is bolstered by the 2025 Amnesty Law for the Military and Police, which applied a statute of limitations to human rights violations committed before 2022, and Law 32735, which expanded the definition of “official duty offenses” and reinstated exclusive military-police jurisdiction over crimes committed during states of emergency. In a country haunted by state violence, where historic military massacres remain unpunished and the state demonstrated its capacity to kill civilians with impunity in Ayacucho and Puno as recently as 2022, Keiko has openly embraced the very tactics that once subjected Peruvian civil society to a state of perpetual fear.
Fujimorismo’s neoliberal playbook
Fujimorismo, both past and present, is defined by its steadfast advocacy for neoliberal structural adjustments. Decades ago, the term “Fujishock” came to encapsulate Alberto Fujimori’s radical economic program aimed at curbing hyperinflation and reintegrating Peru’s struggling economy into the global market. Chief among these measures were the elimination of staple food subsidies, price liberalization, state-enterprise privatization, aggressive trade deregulation, labor flexibility, currency flotation, the creation of a private pension system and ultimately the drafting of the 1993 Constitution.
The elimination of subsidies during his Fujishock triggered unprecedented poverty and malnutrition, which targeted relief programs like FONCODES and PRONAA were never equipped to remedy. Likewise, the 1992 establishment of the Sistema Privado de Pensiones (SPP) and the arrival of private pension fund managers (AFPs) lie at the very root of why the average monthly pension remains the equivalent of around $296, with over 10% of retirees receiving a mere $30 to $150. Furthermore, by adhering to the Washington Consensus and privatizing critical national infrastructure including telecommunications, electricity and transportation, Fujimorismo surrendered state sovereignty. Transforming public infrastructure into private corporate ventures bred opacity and rampant corruption, culminating in massive scandals like Lava Jato , the continental bribery scheme in which Fuerza Popular itself is deeply implicated.
She requested extraordinary legislative powers from Congress.
This deregulation playbook endured into the 21st century. In 2014, under President Ollanta Humala, Fuerza Popular co-orchestrated Law 30288 — infamously dubbed the Ley Pulpín — which purported to incentivize youth employment by drastically lowering labor costs for private firms. By stripping young workers of paid vacation, bonuses, social benefits and severance pay, the law became a flashpoint for anti-neoliberal resistance, sparking nationwide protests before its repeal in January 2015.
In her inaugural address, Keiko Fujimori initially appeared to break with this doctrine by announcing a minimum wage increase from $335 to $385 a month. Just a day later, however, she requested extraordinary legislative powers from Congress under the banner of boosting economic productivity and tackling youth unemployment. Indeed, a leaked internal document reveals that her administration intends to restructure recruitment mechanisms, alter social benefit regimes and introduce greater flexibility into employee dismissal procedures, signaling a return to classic Fujimorista labor deregulation.
Finally, Keiko is relying on a familiar slate of meager technocratic interventions that similarly characterized historic Fujimorismo. Beyond promising youth employment reforms, Keiko’s Fujimorismo pledges to address endemic childhood poverty and chronic malnutrition, ensure dignified pensions for the elderly, complete critical infrastructure projects such as Lima’s metro lines and rural highways, and elevate Peru’s standing within an increasingly multipolar global trade landscape. Naturally, none of these proposals acknowledge how Alberto Fujimori’s structural adjustments — and their long-term fallout — helped construct the neoliberal dystopia Peru grapples with today. Keiko promises to fix the very crises her father created using the exact same mechanisms that generated them in the first place.
The road ahead
The coming weeks will reveal the true nature of Keiko’s administration and the mechanisms by which Fuerza Popular will attempt to consolidate power.
If her career has demonstrated any single constant, it is a stark divergence between rhetoric and reality. In 2011, she denied receiving corporate backing, only for business tycoons Dionisio Romero and Jorge Barata to reveal millions in undisclosed cash contributions. In 2016, she pledged not to weaponize Congress, yet Fuerza Popular went on to sponsor or support nine separate presidential impeachment motions over the next decade. In 2021, she alleged widespread fraud in the presidential runoff, attempting to annul thousands of rural ballots despite international observers from the OAS, the EU and the U.S. State Department certifying the election’s integrity. Given this record, observers should scrutinize the historical fine print of Keiko’s public commitments with extreme care.
Peru’s crisis could be further exacerbated by intense political polarization given the high stakes of the election. With the reinstatement of a bicameral legislature — restoring both chambers for the first time since Alberto Fujimori’s unconstitutional autogolpe dissolved Congress in 1992 — Peru enters a new institutional era. Keiko must navigate a fragmented legislative environment across both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, where Roberto Sánchez’s coalition, Juntos por el Perú, maintains a sizable bloc of 32 deputies and 14 senators. If she fails to forge coalitions with other right-leaning factions and faces persistent parliamentary deadlock, Keiko will likely be forced to rely on executive decree powers. However, governing by decree — another signature of Fujimorismo — risks reinforcing the very authoritarian image that the current Fuerza Popular has attempted to shed. Meanwhile, social movements and grassroots coalitions, most notably the National Organization of Relatives and Victims of the 2022-2023 Masacres, have pledged to mobilize against her administration, with several factions refusing to recognize her presidency outright. Should these protests escalate in the coming months, Keiko’s administration will have laid the groundwork for yet another wave of state-led violent repression.
Fujimorismo may be back, but the struggle for Peru only begins.
The post The Return of Fujimorismo appeared first on Truthdig .
The Return of Fujimorismo
Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at TruthDig.