JNE's Critical Error: Peru's Runoff Lacks Democratic Legitimacy

Peru's electoral authority has engineered a runoff that represents a historic collapse in democratic legitimacy. The two candidates advancing to the second round will have captured just 29.13 percent of the votes cast in the first round—a stunning contrast to neighboring democracies where runoff finalists typically command more than half the electorate. Ecuador's runoff candidates represented 88 percent of votes; Bolivia's, 57 percent; Chile's, 51 percent. Here, the gap between Peru and its peers is not a matter of degree but of kind.

The mathematics of representation grow darker under scrutiny. If the winner is Fujimori, she will have been chosen by 14.2 percent of those who voted in the first round, and just 10.2 percent of all registered voters. Sánchez fares even worse: 10 percent of first-round voters, 7.18 percent of the total electorate. These are not margins of victory. They are margins of exclusion. Had Congress approved a more sensible rule—allowing as many candidates as necessary to advance until their combined vote share exceeded 50 percent—four candidates would have moved forward: Fujimori, Sánchez, López Aliaga, and Nieto, together commanding 52.02 percent. The institutional choice to narrow the field was deliberate, and its consequences are severe.

But the runoff's legitimacy crisis arrives amid a deeper institutional breakdown. Alonso Segura, president of Peru's Fiscal Council, has documented that Congress has locked S/36.7 billion in fixed spending into the annual budget, starving investment of resources. Three of the parties responsible for this fiscal constraint now compete in the runoff itself—a paradox that exposes how thoroughly Peru's political class has hollowed out the state's capacity to act. The next president will inherit not just a narrow mandate but a government stripped of flexibility.

Then there is the matter of promises. Both candidates have pledged rapid, transformative progress against organized crime—a commitment that is, by any serious assessment, impossible to deliver within the timeframe they suggest. When these promises inevitably go unfulfilled, the next government will face not just the usual friction of governance but the specific resentment of a public that was offered the moon and handed a stone.

The National Electoral Jury's decision to proceed with a two-candidate runoff under these conditions was, in the view of this analysis, fundamentally mistaken. Evidence continues to emerge about the scale of the damage: voting locations in Lima were compromised, and according to investigative reporting, Piero Corvetto, a key electoral official, allegedly modified procurement rules to prevent challenges and acted on knowledge that electoral material distribution in the capital had been fraudulent. Experts disagree sharply on whether the number of affected voters was negligible, as the JNE has argued. José Tello has noted that abstention rises when voters perceive problems with polling places and decide not to participate. Enzo Elguera has criticized the JNE's failure to adequately oversee the election the day before it took place.

The JNE still has time to correct course. The correction should not be made to appease any particular candidate, nor even primarily for reasons of future governability, but because Peru's Constitution demands it. Article 31 is explicit: citizens have the right to vote, and the vote is personal, equal, free, secret, and obligatory. Any act that prohibits or limits the exercise of this right is null and punishable. While nationwide supplementary elections may not be technically feasible, the same constraint does not necessarily apply to Lima Metropolitan, where the disruption occurred. One possibility: delay the transfer of power until August 30—the feast day of Santa Rosa de Lima—and conduct a fresh vote in the affected region.

Peru has endured ten years of institutional turbulence, cycling through presidents with numbing regularity. The next government will inherit a state that is fiscally constrained, institutionally compromised, and burdened with impossible expectations. It deserves at least the foundation of a legitimate mandate. The electoral authority has the power to provide one. Whether it will remains an open question.