Lima.- The right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori remains ahead of the left-wing candidate Roberto Sánchez with a lead of 5.02 percentage points, reaching 25.27% of the vote count of the second round of Peru’s presidential elections.
After a quarter of the votes cast in this election day have been counted, Fujimori receives 52.51% of the valid votes by obtaining 2,608,002 ballots, as opposed to the 47.49% for Sánchez, who registers 2,358,628 votes of support.
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The votes counted so far belong mostly to the capital, Lima, and other cities in the country, where Fujimori is the most voted candidate, while Sánchez concentrates her support in rural areas, whose votes are usually the last to be counted.
The trend of the first part of the vote count is in line with the exit polls released at the closing of the polls, which indicated a technical tie with a slight advantage for Fujimori, which anticipates a very tight finish by a few thousand votes as already happened in the two previous elections.
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In the last two elections, Fujimori, who is running for the presidency of Peru for the fourth time, fell just short of the Government Palace by barely 40,000 votes against Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (2016) and Pedro Castillo (2021).
According to the polling firm Ipsos, Fujimori received 50.7% of the valid votes and Sánchez obtained 49.3%, while Datum indicated that the candidate from the Fuerza Popular party obtained 50.53% of the votes and the candidate from Juntos por el Perú 49.47%.
The first one shows a difference of 1.4 percentage points between both, while the second reduces that margin to just 1.06%. Both polls have a margin of error of 3%, which makes the difference in both not yet conclusive enough to determine a winner for this election.
More than 27.3 million Peruvians were called to the polls to choose the option that will govern the country for the next five years (2026-2031), after a decade of political instability that has seen eight presidents in ten years, the result of a series of presidential removals promoted by Parliament.
