Keiko Fujimori, leader of the Peruvian party Popular Force and eldest daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, ran for president of Peru in four consecutive general elections: 2011, 2016, 2021, and 2026. The only candidate in modern Peruvian history to reach four consecutive presidential runoffs, she lost the first three by narrow margins before defeating Roberto Sánchez in 2026 by fewer than 50,000 votes. The victory made her the first woman elected president of Peru, returning Fujimorism to the presidency 25 years after her father's government collapsed.
Fujimori's father's 1990–2000 government was a central issue in each campaign, and her position on his legacy shifted over time. She pledged not to pardon him in 2011 and 2016, signing a public commitment in 2016 to reject his government's authoritarian practices. She reversed this position in 2021, promising a pardon, and in 2026 campaigned on continuity with his security and economic record. Her platforms combined hardline "mano dura" security policies with support for Peru's market-oriented economic model. Each campaign also mobilized a durable "anti-Fujimorista" bloc (voters opposed to her candidacy on principle) which analysts have identified as a factor in her three defeats. Commentators have characterized her politics variously as conservative, right-wing populist, or far-right; she has presented Fujimorism as a modern conservative, law-and-order movement.
Through Fujimori's campaigns, Popular Force (founded as Fuerza 2011) became Peru's dominant legislative force, holding a congressional majority or leading bloc from 2016 onward and using it to destabilize successive presidencies and shield Fujimori from prosecution. From 2018 she faced the Odebrecht-related Cocktails Case, which alleged money laundering in her 2011 and 2016 campaign finances; she spent more than a year in pretrial detention before the case was dismissed in January 2026, days after she launched her successful fourth bid. Her candidacies were repeatedly marked by contested results: she made unsubstantiated fraud claims after losing in 2021, and her 2026 victory was similarly disputed by her defeated opponent.
2011 campaign
Party formation and organization
Fujimori announced the creation of a new party, Fuerza 2011 (later Popular Force), in January 2008, intended to carry her father's movement into the 2011 election with herself as candidate if he remained legally barred from running. The move split Fujimorism between "albertista" loyalists of Alberto Fujimori and "keikista" supporters of his daughter, with the older Fujimorist vehicles Cambio 90 and New Majority retaining their independence. The party was formally registered in March 2010 after collecting more than one million signatures, far exceeding the legal requirement.
In a study of the campaign, political scientist Adriana Urrutia argued that Fuerza 2011 used the election itself as an instrument of party-building and of relegitimizing Fujimorism: the campaign activated organizational networks and latent loyalties dating to the 1990s, and the composition of its technical team — dominated by lawyers, technocrats, and business executives — reproduced the recruitment patterns of Fujimorist congressional benches from the 1990–2001 period. The organization remained personalist and vertical: candidate selection was controlled by a small leadership circle around the Fujimori family, with Alberto Fujimori himself deciding, from prison, who appeared on the party's congressional lists. Ana Herz de la Vega, a longtime family confidante, served as party secretary. For the presidential ticket, Fujimori declared her candidacy in December 2010 with defense minister Rafael Rey of the conservative National Renewal as first vice-presidential candidate and Jaime Yoshiyama, a minister under her father, as second. The campaign also retained former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani as a security-policy adviser.
Platform and first-round campaign The party's government plan rested on four pillars — eliminating extreme poverty, a more efficient state, defeating crime and terrorism, and employment promotion — alongside proposals for the death penalty for certain crimes, free trade, and merit-based education reform. The candidacy was built substantially on a defense of her father's government, credited with defeating terrorism and stabilizing the economy, while distancing itself from its collapse: Fujimori attributed human-rights violations and corruption principally to Vladimiro Montesinos, acknowledged "errors" and "excesses", recalled her own opposition to her father's third term, and pledged not to use the presidential pardon power on his behalf. During the campaign she acknowledged receiving US$10,000 in her 2006 congressional race from donors with drug-trafficking convictions, characterizing them as victims of persecution.
First round In the 10 April first round, Fujimori placed second with about 23.6% of valid votes, behind the left-nationalist Ollanta Humala of Gana Perú (31.7%) and ahead of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Alejandro Toledo, and Luis Castañeda Lossio. Fuerza 2011 became the second-largest congressional bloc with 37 seats, and her brother Kenji Fujimori won the highest individual vote of any congressional candidate. Analysts at the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos read the Humala–Fujimori runoff pairing as evidence that, despite five years of growth, large parts of the electorate remained distrustful of institutions and demanded a stronger state presence.
Runoff: endorsements, debates, and strategy The runoff realigned the eliminated field: Kuczynski, Castañeda, and former APRA candidate Mercedes Aráoz endorsed Fujimori, while Toledo — and, prominently, Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, who described a Fujimori presidency as the worse of two dangers — backed Humala. With roughly half the electorate rejecting each candidate in polls, the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs estimated that some eight million mostly centrist voters saw themselves as choosing a "lesser evil"; according to political scientist Sinesio López, each campaign mobilized fear of the other — economic disruption under Humala, a return to 1990s corruption and abuses under Fujimori.
Both campaigns pivoted toward the center. Fujimori moderated her discourse and deepened her distancing from her father, while, according to a study of the campaign's messaging, Fuerza 2011 shifted its central frame from security and opportunity to "defense of the economic model", exploiting doubts about Humala's commitment to the market economy. Urrutia observed a cost to this pivot: the elevation of the "keikista" leadership circle over "albertista" networks in the second round led some regional party bases to withdraw active support.
The formal runoff debates comprised a technical-team debate between the Gana Perú and Fuerza 2011 policy teams and a candidates' debate on 29 May in Lima. In the latter, Humala pressed Fujimori on her role as first lady during the forced sterilizations of the 1990s, while Fujimori sought to tie Humala to Montesinos's flight from Peru and attacked his past coup attempts; she insisted that Humala was debating her, not her father. Contemporary coverage described the exchange as dominated as much by mutual attacks as by proposals — Fujimori emphasizing free school meals and early-childhood programs, Humala his "Pensión 65" transfer for the elderly poor.
Result Final polls showed a statistical tie. In the 5 June runoff Fujimori lost to Humala, 48.66% to 51.34% — a margin of about 450,000 votes, the widest of her four runoffs — drawing her strongest support from the business community, conservatives, most of the press, small business, the church, and the Lima middle class, and, within poorer electorates, performing better in urban-marginal districts than rural ones, where Humala won 40 of the country's 49 poorest provinces. She conceded on election night and congratulated Humala personally.
Between campaigns In 2012–2013 the party was renamed Fuerza Popular, retaining Fujimori as president and its orange "K" branding. Political scientist Paolo Sosa has described the inter-election period as a deliberate institutionalization drive motivated by the 2011 runoff defeat: the party sidelined figures associated with the most controversial episodes of 1990s Fujimorism, recruited younger and more technical cadres, and organized nationally with the explicit goal of winning in 2016. Fujimori traveled the country to soften resistance tied to her father's legacy and led opinion polling through 2015 despite holding no public office. A family request for a humanitarian pardon for her father was denied by President Humala in 2013.
2016 campaign
Party renewal and candidacy Popular Force approached 2016 with the explicit goal, set after the 2011 runoff defeat, of winning outright. Political scientist Paolo Sosa has described the intervening party renewal as a bid to institutionalize and moderate: figures evocative of the most controversial episodes of 1990s Fujimorism were sidelined, more technical cadres recruited, and the presidential ticket composed to signal the shift — though, Sosa notes, the process sharpened internal conflict between the classic Fujimorist old guard and Keiko Fujimori's renovating circle. Fujimori announced her candidacy on 4 December 2015 with José Chlimper, a former agriculture minister under her father, and Vladimiro Huaroc, a former regional governor of Junín, as running mates, on a platform of six "pillars" combining institutional and human-rights guarantees, free-market economics, tax cuts, small-business incentives, and rural electricity and internet expansion.
The pre-election period was dominated by JNE disqualifications. Of 19 initial candidates, nine were excluded or withdrew; leading rivals César Acuña (for handing out money at campaign events) and Julio Guzmán (over internal party-procedure defects) were barred, while a parallel bid to disqualify Fujimori over allegedly prohibited gift-giving was dismissed for lack of evidence. Press coverage noted that the divergent outcomes fueled suspicions of uneven application of the electoral rules and, in some readings, of rulings favorable to Fujimori's candidacy.
First round and the anti-authoritarian pledge Facing sustained anti-Fujimorista mobilization — including a march of more than 50,000 people in Lima's Plaza San Martín on the anniversary of the 1992 self-coup, organized around the "No a Keiko" movement — Fujimori made her most explicit break yet with her father's record. At the JNE's first-round candidates' debate on 3 April, she signed a "commitment of honor" pledging to respect democratic institutions, term limits, and press freedom and not to repeat the authoritarian practices of his government; she promised not to pardon him (describing it as a family decision), endorsed the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the first time, pledged reparations for women subjected to forced sterilizations, and stated she would not seek re-election if she won. Her disapproval nonetheless remained around 45%, driven principally by her father's legacy.
She won the 10 April first round decisively with about 40% of valid votes, against roughly 21% for Pedro Pablo Kuczynski of Peruvians for Change and 19% for the left's Verónika Mendoza, and Popular Force took an absolute majority of 73 of 130 congressional seats — the platform of legislative power it would hold for the following decade.
Runoff: campaign, debates, and the Ramírez affair