With 98 per cent of the votes counted, the two candidates are separated by just over 600 votes out of 18 million. And the real protagonist at this moment is not the two political parties: it is the Peruvian diaspora scattered across Spain, the United States and Argentina.

The narrowest margin ever

At times, the figures look like a typo. With 98.208 per cent of the votes counted, Keiko Fujimori — the Fuerza Popular candidate — has 9,032,615 votes, equal to 50.002 per cent.
Roberto Sánchez, the Juntos por el Perú candidate and heir to the Peruvian left, has 9,032,000, equal to 49.998 per cent. The difference is 615 votes out of nearly eighteen million.

To put this into perspective: Lima’s Monumental Stadium holds eighty times that number.

The Peruvian election is unfolding like a thriller – perhaps even a rather poor one – in which the plot twist comes not just at the end, but at every turn.
On Sunday evening, Sánchez seemed to have the race almost in the bag, with a lead that reached nearly forty thousand votes. On Monday, the gap began to narrow. On Tuesday evening, as results from the Andes came in, Sánchez consolidated her lead once again. On Wednesday morning, as overseas polling stations opened, Fujimori began to catch up. And for the first time since the start of the count, she took the lead by just a few hundred votes. After losing three run-offs — against Ollanta Humala in 2011, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in 2016 and Pedro Castillo in 2021 — history could have a different ending this time. But it is still all to play for.

The geography of a nation divided in two

The electoral map of this second round is the now familiar picture of a country divided along geographical and income lines.
Sánchez has won in 17 of Peru’s 25 constituencies, with landslide victories in the Andean south and the centre.

We are talking about Cusco, Puno, Ayacucho, Apurímac, the Andean highlands where the progressive vote has been entrenched since the time of Castillo’s uprising.
In some polling stations in Cusco, in hard-to-reach areas such as La Convención, Sánchez secured 80% of the vote.

Fujimori, for his part, dominates the northern coast, Lima, and the lowland Amazon rainforest. Lima alone, where Fujimori has 63.4 per cent, accounts for around a third of the entire national electorate.

The missing vote counts are not distributed randomly. A large proportion come from remote Andean areas, which can only be reached by helicopter when the weather permits, and from overseas polling stations that are still being established. This is where everything hinges, and this is where the situation changes decisively.

The diaspora that rewrites the ending

There are around 1.2 million Peruvians living outside Peru who are eligible to vote. Less than a third of them – around 300,000 – actually voted. A drop, it would seem, in a sea of 18 million votes. Yet that drop in the ocean is becoming increasingly significant. Historically, the overseas vote has leaned decisively to the right: as early as 2021, Fujimori won it with almost two-thirds of the vote against Pedro Castillo. This time too, the partial results confirm the trend: with 85.9 per cent of overseas ballots counted, the Fuerza Popular candidate stands at 63.5 per cent against Sánchez’s 36.4 per cent.

The main factors are Spain, home to one of the largest Peruvian communities in Europe, the United States — particularly Florida and New Jersey — and Argentina. Across the Americas as a whole, Fujimori leads his opponent by 15 points.
The overseas vote not only supports Fujimori’s candidacy; it is key to understanding his comeback, several Peruvian newspapers have reported in recent hours.

What is really missing, and why it will still take weeks

However, it would be a mistake to think that the race is over once the vote count reaches 100 per cent.
Because in Peru, between the update from the ONPE —the Oficina Nacional de Procesos Electorales — and the official announcement of the winner by the JNE, the Jurado Nacional de Elecciones, there are lengthy and far from automatic procedures.

Over 1,600 actas remain to be resolved , awaiting transmission to the Jurados Electorales Especiales, the JNE divisions that assess their validity.
Then there are hundreds of actas observadas (contested reports) that both political camps are currently filing: procedural irregularities, missing signatures, alleged counting errors. And there remain the challenges that each of the two parties will, predictably, use asymmetrically depending on the trend in the figures.

The president of the JNE has already stated at a press conference that the official announcement of the winner could take up to a month.
This means that, barring any unexpected developments, the name of Peru’s next president will not be known until July.

Two, perhaps three more weeks of vote counting, recounts, appeals and political tensions. It is a scenario that evokes with concern what happened in 2021, when Pedro Castillo’s victory was announced a month and a half after the vote, with the nation at a standstill and Fujimori speaking of fraud before finally conceding defeat.