Peruvians vote Sunday, June 8, in what polls describe as a tight, polarized presidential contest between hard-right candidate Keiko Fujimori and leftist Roberto Sánchez — the country’s 10th presidential election in just 10 years.
No projected winner. No clear frontrunner. The race is that close.
Background
Peru’s political churn has been relentless. A decade of crises — impeachments, resignations, a sitting president arrested at the airport — has left the country cycling through heads of state at a pace with few parallels in the region. Sunday’s vote is the latest attempt to break that cycle, though neither candidate has managed to pull away from the other in polling ahead of the election.
Fujimori, daughter of imprisoned former president Alberto Fujimori, has run for Peru’s presidency before — twice — and lost both times in second-round votes. She’s running again on a hard-right platform. Sánchez is pressing from the left, in a country where the ideological divide between candidates has grown sharper with each election cycle.
Polls going into Sunday showed the two in a neck-and-neck race, with the outcome too uncertain to call. Whether either candidate can consolidate enough support to govern effectively — in a congress that has historically clashed with the executive — isn’t answered by the vote count alone.
NPR photographer Rodrigo Abd documented the campaign in the lead-up to Sunday’s election.
Reporting by NPR. Read the original report.
