LIMA, PERÚ — On February 18, 2026, Peru swore in its ninth president in ten years. His name is José María Balcázar. He is 83 years old, currently under investigation for bribery, and entered office with a 63% disapproval rating. He replaced José Jerí, who had lasted four months before being ousted over secret meetings with a Chinese businessman in a scandal the Peruvian press immediately dubbed “Chifagate.” Jerí had replaced Dina Boluarte, who was unanimously impeached in October after a cumbia concert shooting at a military-controlled arena in Lima became the final straw for a Congress that had already blocked eight previous attempts to remove her.
Boluarte had replaced Pedro Castillo, who was arrested live on television in 2022 after attempting to dissolve Congress and rule by decree. Castillo was subsequently sentenced to eleven years in prison.
Of Peru’s last eight presidents, four have been impeached and removed from office, and two resigned before the end of their term. The country that goes to the polls on April 12 has not completed a full, uninterrupted presidential term since Ollanta Humala left office in 2016. And the 27.3 million Peruvians voting this Sunday know, with a weariness that has become something like national character, that whoever they choose may not survive the term either.
The Carousel Doesn’t Stop by Accident
Understanding why Peru keeps consuming its presidents requires looking past the individual scandals — the bribery, the secret meetings, the cumbia concert — to the constitutional machinery underneath.
The Constitution of Peru’s 1993 charter allows Congress to impeach a president on the broadly interpreted grounds of “moral incapacity” — a vague standard that has effectively made the legislature more powerful than the executive branch.
Every president who has entered the palace since 2016 has done so knowing that a motivated congressional majority could remove them at will, for reasons that require no proof of criminal conviction — only a vote.
The result is a governing environment in which no executive can build sustained policy, no coalition holds, and no institutional trust accumulates. Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington, watched the Jerí ouster with undisguised cynicism: “It strikes me that there is no trace of high-mindedness here, only electoral calculations.”
That assessment applies equally to the party that impeached Boluarte. Keiko Fujimori’s Popular Force had shielded Boluarte from eight prior impeachment attempts before withdrawing its support when elections drew near — a calculated repositioning to avoid being associated with an unpopular administration heading into the 2026 campaign.
The same party now leads the polls.
35 Candidates, No Mandate
A record 35 candidates remain in Sunday’s first-round race, vying for the votes of an electorate primarily concerned about insecurity and corruption. No candidate is polling above 15% and a runoff on June 7 is virtually certain.
The latest Ipsos polling shows Keiko Fujimori leading at 13%, followed by comedian and television personality Carlos Álvarez at 9%, and former Lima Mayor Rafael López Aliaga in third at 8% — a dramatic fall for a candidate who led the field at nearly 15% in February. Álvarez’s rise is the most notable late-campaign development: a political outsider with no governing experience whose debate performances drove his numbers from under 4% in January to near double digits in April. The pattern of Peruvian voters gravitating toward outsiders is not new.
Pedro Castillo, a rural schoolteacher and union leader with no political experience, won the presidency in 2021.
The field also includes candidates who have pledged to slash government ministries, use military courts for civilian prosecutions, and request U.S. boots on the ground to combat crime — with one candidate explicitly modeling himself on El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and conservative populist, Argentina’s Javier Milei.
The country’s homicide rate has doubled since 2019, and extortion has become a defining feature of daily life in Lima and beyond. Voters are not choosing between visions for Peru’s future. They are choosing who they trust most to stop the bleeding.
Fujimori's Fourth Run — and What It Means
Keiko Fujimori is running for the presidency for the fourth time. She has never won. She lost in 2011, 2016, and 2021 — the last time by fewer than 45,000 votes, in one of the most contested elections in Peruvian history.
Her father, Alberto Fujimori, governed Peru from 1990 to 2000 under a regime that combined economic stabilization with documented human rights abuses, forced sterilizations of indigenous women, and systematic corruption. Keiko herself spent time in pretrial detention on money-laundering charges before the case was ultimately dismissed.
She remains, nonetheless, the candidate to beat — because in a 35-candidate field with a fragmented electorate, 13% is a plurality. Her base is disciplined, with 77% of her supporters telling pollsters they will not change their vote, which in an environment of high undecided rates gives her a structural advantage over candidates whose support is softer.
López Aliaga, the former Lima mayor whose style has drawn comparisons to Trump, entered the race as the frontrunner and is ending it in third. His decline tracks with growing voter skepticism about whether his combative approach — military courts, U.S. military assistance, confrontational governance — represents a solution or an escalation of the country’s institutional dysfunction.
New Senate, Old Problems
For the first time since 1992, Peruvians will also elect a Senate on April 12, the result of a 2024 electoral reform that reinstated a bicameral system and reversed a ban on consecutive terms for legislators.
The return of the Senate is designed to add a deliberative check on the Congress that has spent a decade eating presidents. Whether it functions that way in practice depends entirely on the political composition of the new body — and with 35 presidential candidates reflecting the same fragmented party landscape, a Senate built from the same wreckage offers no guarantee of stability.
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
Election observers have raised the fear that whoever wins on April 12 could face the same quick-fire impeachment proceedings that have consumed their predecessors — with the “moral incapacity” clause functioning as a political weapon rather than a constitutional safeguard.
The next president of Peru will take office on July 28, 2026 — Peru’s Independence Day — with a fractured Congress, a security crisis, an economy growing at below 3 percent, and the full knowledge that the institutional machinery used to destroy the last four presidents remains intact and operational, ready to take down the next one.
The question Peruvians are really asking as they approach the ballot box is not who should lead the country — it is whether any election can be the reset needed to slow the revolving presidential door that has defined Peruvian politics for the last decade.
After nine presidents in ten years, the answer is not obvious. What is obvious is that Sunday’s vote, whatever its outcome, is not the end of the story. It is, at best, the beginning of the next chapter of the same one.
Peru’s first-round presidential election takes place on April 12, 2026. Sociedad Media will continue to monitor results and report on all developments through the first round and potential June 7 runoff. Tips and feedback: info@sociedadmedia.com
