With 50% of ballots processed, the ONPE shows Fujimori at 17.05% and López Aliaga at 15.36%, with centrist Jorge Nieto in third at 13.25%.
Datum’s rapid count at 100% confirms Fujimori first, López Aliaga second.
Fujimori told supporters the results were “a very positive sign for our country” and declared “the enemy is the left,” adding that according to quick-count results the left would not reach the second round.
López Aliaga alleged “grave electoral fraud” on Sunday’s voting while calling on supporters to take to the streets.
Officials confirmed police raided the private subcontractor responsible for failing to deliver ballots and electoral materials on time.
Voting continues Monday morning for 52,251 Lima voters.
Full official results expected by on Wednesday April 15.
Sociedad Media will continue to update when the runoff elections pairing is confirmed.
LIMA — On Sunday morning, police raided the offices of ONPE — Peru’s national electoral authority — as 27 million Peruvians were in the middle of voting for their country’s next president. The raid, confirmed by AFP, disrupted operations and contributed to delays severe enough that electoral authorities extended voting until Monday at 7 a.m. local time in Lima and at two polling stations in the United States.
Election day was marred by delays and irregularities that sparked accusations of foul play and cast a shadow over the results.
It was, by any measure, a fitting prologue for a country that has had nine presidents in less than a decade.
By Sunday night, early official results from ONPE showed right-wing businessman Rafael López Aliaga leading the presidential race with 23.4% of the vote, according to Reuters. The figure comes from approximately 5% of ballots counted — enough to signal momentum but far too early to determine the final result. Exit polls from Ipsos and Datum had placed Keiko Fujimori in front with 16.6%, followed by a statistical four-way tie for second place.
The gap between those exit poll numbers and the early official count reflects the volatility that has defined Peruvian elections for a decade.
What is not in dispute is that a runoff will happen. No candidate was anywhere near the 50% threshold required to win outright in the first round. The runoff is scheduled for June 7, 2026. What remains unresolved — and will likely remain unresolved until ONPE completes its count on Monday — is who López Aliaga or Fujimori will face on that date.
Who is López Aliaga
Rafael López Aliaga, 65, is a railway and luxury hotel magnate who won the Lima mayoralty in 2022 with 26.4% of the vote and resigned in late 2025 to run for president. A member of the conservative Catholic organization Opus Dei, he has run a right-wing campaign centered on crime, anti-corruption, and traditional Catholic values. He is known by the nickname “Porky” — a reference to the cartoon character — which he has embraced as a deliberate brand identity.
He has pledged to slash government ministries, align himself closely with U.S. President Donald Trump and Argentina’s Javier Milei, deploy troops to Peru’s borders, and use military courts for civilian prosecutions. He has also expressed admiration for El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and proposed inviting U.S. intelligence to operate inside Peru to capture gang leaders.
Aliaga’s surge in the official count was unexpected. Pre-election polls had shown him sliding — he had fallen to just 7 percent of voter intent in the final Ipsos poll released a week before the vote, with Fujimori overtaking him by eight points.
The divergence between those polls and the early ONPE count is either a sign of a significant late surge among Lima’s urban right-wing voters — his strongest base — or an artifact of which precincts have reported first.
The Fujimori Question
Keiko Fujimori, 50, is poised to advance to her fourth consecutive presidential runoff — having run in 2011, 2016, and 2021 without winning the presidency.
One recent survey found that 54% of Peruvians said they would not vote for her under any circumstances. She, too, leads a right-wing congressional bloc and remains the most organizationally sophisticated candidate in the race despite her persistent ceiling in public support.
The scenario emerging from Sunday’s count — a López Aliaga versus Fujimori runoff — would pit two right-wing candidates against each other for the presidency, potentially alienating Peru’s left entirely and producing one of the more unusual electoral matchups in the country’s recent history.
The Country They Would Govern
Whoever wins on June 7 inherits a country in measurable decline on the issues that dominated the campaign. The primary concerns among voters were corruption and crime, with extortion and homicides increasing greatly since the previous election. Security became the central concern for voters.
Peru’s homicide rate has doubled in the past decade, while reported extortion cases jumped from 3,200 to 26,500 per year.
They also inherit the institutional wreckage of a system that has consumed nine presidents in ten years. The last president, José Jerí, was removed from office in February 2026 by Congress for holding undisclosed meetings with a Chinese businessman under government scrutiny, making him Peru’s ninth head of state in less than a decade.
Congress warned observers of its attempt to build what the Council on Foreign Relations described as a “mafia state” in the run-up to the election.
The new bicameral legislature — Peru’s Congress returns to a bicameral structure for the first time since the 1990s, with a 60-seat Senate and 130-seat Chamber of Deputies — adds a new variable to the institutional equation. Whether it produces greater stability or simply more vectors for presidential removal remains to be seen.
The count continues Monday morning. The runoff is on June 7. The chaos is, for Peru, entirely familiar.
The Count Shifts — and So Does the Story
As the night progressed and ONPE’s official tally moved beyond the urban precincts of Lima that reported first, the picture changed significantly from the early returns that had showed López Aliaga leading with 23.4%.
With 30% of tallies processed, López Aliaga stood at 18% and Fujimori at 17% on early Monday morning. At 10% processed, López Aliaga had held 22% to Fujimori’s 16%.
The pattern is consistent with what analysts expected — Lima’s urban conservative base reports early and over-represents right-wing candidates before regional and rural votes arrive.
Datum’s rapid count, based on approximately 300,000 voting tallies collected nationally, placed Fujimori in first and López Aliaga in second. Datum CEO Urpi Torrado said the 52,000 votes still to be cast Monday would not alter the direction of the result. “They will vary by tenths of a percentage, but I don’t think it will change the direction of the results. Whoever is in fifth or sixth place will not move to second. Each tenth of a percent represents approximately 20,000 votes,” she told América TV.
If the Datum rapid count holds — and wire services confirm what Peruvian outlets are reporting — the June 7 runoff will pit Fujimori against López Aliaga in a contest between two candidates of the right. That matchup would be the first all-right-wing presidential runoff in Peru’s modern democratic history, and it would effectively leave the left without a candidate in the decisive round for the first time since the political crisis cycle began in 2016.
The Datum count still awaits confirmation from ONPE’s official tally, which authorities said could take until Wednesday to reach 100% given the distance of some voting locations and the verification of disputed tallies.
This article has been updated to reflect Datum’s rapid count results and the evolving official ONPE tally. The runoff pairing has not yet been confirmed by wire services. Full official results are expected by Wednesday April 15. Sociedad Media will continue to monitor Peru’s electoral process through the June 7 runoff. For stories & inquiries, contact us at info@sociedadmedia.com
