Keiko's Assumption: The Return of Fujimorism to a Peru That No Longer Exists

Before Keiko Fujimori takes office, Peru will have regained an institution that has been absent for more than three decades. This Friday, July 24, the sixty members of the new Senate will be sworn in, which disappeared after Alberto Fujimori's self-coup in 1992 and was definitively suppressed by the 1993 Constitution, which established a unicameral Congress.

There is something revealing in that scene. The heir of Fujimorism will begin her term with an institutional design that recovers one of the main checks and balances that her father's government had eliminated. Few images better summarize the institutional and political transformation that Peru has undergone since then and anticipate the scenario that the new president will encounter.

For years, much of the debate revolved around a single question: whether Keiko Fujimori's return would also imply the return of the political model built by her father. Probably not. Not because the surname has lost influence, but because the Peru that welcomes the new president has little in common with that of the past.

After three consecutive electoral defeats, Keiko has finally come to power. Her real challenge will not be to recreate the past. Now she must demonstrate that Fujimorism can still offer governability in a scenario where the rules of the game have completely changed.

Peru arrives at this new stage after almost a decade of political instability. Dismissed presidents, resignations, dissolutions of Congress, massive protests, and a permanent confrontation between the Executive and Legislative branches have progressively eroded citizens' trust in institutions. The crisis has ceased to be an exceptional episode and has become a habitual way of functioning in the political system.

In this context, Keiko's victory expresses less a majority adherence to Fujimorism than the exhaustion of a society that sought to regain some order after years of political crisis. The tight electoral result, however, confirms that the country remains deeply divided and that the legitimacy of the new government will depend, above all, on its ability to build agreements.

The recovery of the Senate responds to that same diagnosis. It reflects the conviction that the institutional design inherited from the nineties is no longer sufficient to process an increasingly fragmented politics and that strengthening deliberation and control mechanisms can help avoid the blockages that marked the last decade. This will be the first major challenge for the next president. The new institutional architecture alone will not guarantee greater governability.

Unlike her father, who exercised power from an Executive with few institutional checks, in a context marked by hyperinflation and the fight against Sendero Luminoso, Keiko will assume with much more limited powers. Congress will remain a decisive actor; no party will have enough capacity to impose its agenda alone, and permanent negotiation will cease to be an option and become a condition for political survival. Fujimorism, in other words, will have to learn to govern without the concentration of power that defined its origins.

Another challenge will be to recover the authority of the State. In recent years, insecurity has ceased to be an exclusively police concern and has become one of the main political problems in the country. Extortion, contract killings, drug trafficking, and especially the expansion of illegal mining have transformed the map of organized crime and exposed the growing difficulties of the State to exercise control over parts of its territory.

The problem goes far beyond the increase in violence. In various regions, criminal organizations have managed to infiltrate formal economies, corrupt local authorities, and build power structures that compete with state institutions. Recovering authority will require much more than increasing police presence or toughening penalties: it will involve rebuilding state capacities that have weakened over years of political instability. No security strategy will be sustainable if the state continues to lose territorial presence to organizations that manage resources, employment, and even informal protection mechanisms.

The economy constitutes another decisive front. Peru retains strengths that many of its neighbors lost long ago. It maintains relatively controlled inflation, a tradition of macroeconomic prudence, and a mining sector that continues to be one of the main engines of growth. However, this stability coexists with institutional deterioration that has ultimately hindered investments, delayed strategic projects, and fueled business uncertainty.

The new government will attempt to convey predictability and regain market confidence. But this task will require a delicate balance. Reactivating investment will be essential to sustain growth, although it will hardly be achieved if it fails to respond to social demands that, for years, have fueled conflicts in mining regions and deepened the distance between Lima and much of the country's interior.

Foreign policy will also test the pragmatism of the new administration. In a scenario marked by the growing rivalry between the United States and China, Peru has ceased to be a peripheral actor and has become a piece of increasing strategic value. Much of this change has a name: the Chancay megaport.

Built with strong participation from Chinese capital, the port promises to transform Peru into the main gateway for trade between South America and Asia across the Pacific. But its importance exceeds logistics. Chancay also makes the country an increasingly relevant asset in the competition between the two great powers, which are vying for influence over trade routes, supply chains, and critical infrastructures of the 21st century.

This new scenario reduces the margin for ideological alignments. The United States will remain an indispensable partner in matters of security, intelligence, and cooperation against drug trafficking, while China will act as a key player for the Peruvian economy, both for the destination of its exports and the volume of its investments. The main task of the next government will be to manage this competition without getting trapped in it and to turn its geographical position into a strategic advantage, rather than a source of vulnerability.

Perhaps the greatest irony of this new political cycle is that the continuity of Fujimorism will depend on demonstrating exactly the opposite of what marked its origins. If Alberto Fujimori built his leadership by strengthening the Executive Power and weakening institutional checks, Keiko will have to govern by negotiating, building agreements, and accepting limits. In a more fragmented country, with a bicameral Congress and a much more demanding society, power is no longer exercised as it was thirty years ago.

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