By Omar Coronel
Peru’s democratic erosion offers a warning beyond the country itself. Autocratization can take root in parliament, thrive amid political fragmentation, and eventually deliver executive power to an organized minority—without a coup, fraud, or an anti-establishment outsider.
At her fourth attempt, Keiko Fujimori won the presidency of Peru. For four years, the country offered an anomaly: a democracy eroding without an autocrat, driven not by an anti-establishment executive but from within Congress, by an unpopular, loosely organized coalition whose executive took orders rather than gave them. In 2026 the phase of congress-led autocratization closes, and fujimorismo—the most organized actor in that old congressional coalition—moves into the executive, now with an electoral mandate. What follows asks how it came about, what it means for Peruvian democracy, and what it warns the region.
A phase closes
The democracy restored in 2000 was weak and without a party system, its accountability the product not of strong institutions but of a standoff in which no actor could dominate: a “balance of the weak.” From 2016 on, a convergence of factors destabilized it. The end of the commodity boom brought economic discontent; the Odebrecht scandal then put the entire political class under threat of prosecution—every recent president, and Fujimori herself, jailed sixteen months awaiting trial—driving them to seize power to escape it, and making presidential vacancies and the dissolution of Congress routine weapons. The fujimorista party, Fuerza Popular (FP), was the least disorganized actor and catalyzed the crisis. Even so, the balance still held: no actor dominated, protest still worked—it brought down Manuel Merino in 2020—and the old anti-fujimorista coalition remained united.
That ended with Pedro Castillo, the rural schoolteacher who won in 2021 with a fringe Marxist-Leninist party. The threat he represented united the right and split the coalition that only anti-fujimorismo held together. After his failed self-coup and removal, the congressional coalition —Fuerza Popular, the hard-right Renovación Popular, and benches ranging from opportunists to the nominally Marxist Perú Libre, more vehicles of independents than parties—installed its allies in the executive. It governed from Congress: shielding its legislators, expanding legislative power over other institutions, co-opting oversight bodies. The result was impunity—fifty protesters killed in 2022–2023 with no consequences, laws passed against the public will—and a faster erosion of state capacity: less oversight, greater penetration by informal and illegal interests.
Carlos Meléndez has described this period as “democratic entropy”: not an authoritarian seizure but formal authority dissolving under the weight of informality—rules that exist but go unenforced, governance by deal rather than law—, where pragmatic informal elites erode the regulatory state without coordination or design, seeking only impunity and deregulation. The diagnosis captures something real, but it underestimates political agency. Informality generates the deregulatory demand; but the erosion became systematic because actors drove it. Scattered votes may converge now and again; they do not sustain a shield year after year without someone ordering them.
It is, therefore, a hollowing with authors rather than an erosion without one. Rodrigo Barrenechea and Alberto Vergara locate them in the informal and illegal interests that penetrated politics to write laws to suit themselves. A qualification: although Peru lacks strong parties—Fuerza Popular could not discipline its more than seventy legislators between 2016 and 2019—it does have organizations whose leaderships display a clear authoritarian will, one of imposition and steamrolling, and fujimorismo is the most practiced at exercising it. They do not drive the erosion with a dictatorial plan; they push it with a disposition to impose themselves that switches on for any goal. And this is what the entropy reading leaves in shadow: the result, whatever its engine, is autocratization. Rulers stop answering to citizens and the checks narrow, enabling the erosion of the state and the trampling of rights. An equilibrium can be both stable and atrocious. The question is not whether it lasts, but what it is that lasts: a regime that killed half a hundred and answered for none.
An engineered field, and chance upon it
How the election resolved fixed the strength and weakness with which Fujimori governs. As Cynthia McClintock documents, the catalyst was not polarization but fragmentation, much of it engineered by the congressional coalition. They made the rules: they eliminated the mandatory primaries (PASO), meant to reduce dispersion, and raised the electoral thresholds. They chose the candidates: bans removed the most viable moderates from the field. The effect was less to fragment than to lift the brake on a fragmentation bred by the absence of a party system: the moderates together held a majority of the vote but split among too many candidates. Fujimori reached the runoff with 17 percent of the valid vote and Roberto Sánchez with 12, together under 30 percent.
On that field, contingency did its work. Fujimori’s rise owes less to her talent than to others’ mistakes. The other right-wing front-runner, Rafael López Aliaga, failed to convince beyond Lima, leaning too hard on the culture war. Sánchez tried to be Castillo’s avatar without the charisma and was himself an establishment figure. And chance weighed in: a logistical failure in Lima, with no sign of intent, may have decided who joined Fujimori in the runoff. In the second round she won narrowly: she lost the domestic vote, her margin settled by ballots abroad. Chance explains which minority advanced; the engineered field, why two minorities did and the majority went unrepresented. The coalition did not choose Fujimori; it stacked the deck so one of its own could win the hand. And the opposition, which could have overturned the result, mustered neither a single candidacy nor a broad alliance. Fujimori thus arrives with strength and fragility at once: she governs with the oversight bodies tilted her way and the leadership of a Senate her coalition designed, against an uncoordinated opposition—but with no majority, with minimal legitimacy, and over a state she helped erode.
What kind of threat
Fujimori has been read as a conventional right, less radical than López Aliaga’s radical-populist one. That is correct: she is not xenophobic, has no refoundational project, her populism is intermittent. As Vergara writes, she is an old right, statist, that wants to be obeyed. But that reading underestimates the danger. One can defend the established order and be consistently authoritarian at once—especially when the order defended is itself the erosion of limits: fujimorismo is punitive, vindicates the authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori, later convicted of crimes against humanity, contested its defeats with baseless fraud claims, and between elections obstructed governments and captured oversight bodies. It respected the rules only where it had no way to bend them.
Its imprint lacks the symbols and excitement of the new right. It offers to govern without consultation, allied with corporate power and with clientelist closeness to popular sectors. It does not mobilize crowds; it administers impunity and the erosion of controls. It is the country’s most organized threat, with its most powerful allies—business associations, much of the media, armed forces and police shielded against past and future abuses—and now the legitimacy of the ballot box and control of a tailor-made Senate, restored against the 2018 referendum, with the last word on legislation. But not everything favors it, and one should not foretell the ending: it lacks a majority and the votes to rewrite the Constitution or seize the oversight bodies, and it lost the lower house, now chaired by the opposition. She is neither Milei nor Bukele, but a long-rejected politician whose record everyone remembers, now riding the usual new-president honeymoon—and she promised order after eroding the state she must now administer. It has authoritarian will and the means to exercise it; whether autocratization deepens, stalls, or reverses will depend on those brakes and on the opposition—though weakness can also precipitate repression, with security forces already shielded from accountability, as Boluarte showed..
A warning for the region
The case leaves three lessons beyond Peru. First: autocratization can incubate in parliament and move to the executive, without coup or fraud—it needs only a tilted, fragmented terrain and an opposition that cannot right it. Second: it can come from establishment professionals, not outsiders, and wear a dry face that is harder to name and resist. Third: it was not structure alone. Informality supplied the demand, but organizations with an authoritarian will —chiefly on the right, but also on the left— drove it, and an opposition unable to coordinate failed to stop them. It could have been prevented, and it was not. When representation empties out and institutions are captured, an organized minority is enough to inherit power, and a fragmented opposition enough to hand it over.
Omar Coronel is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and coordinates the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Conflicts and Social Inequalities (GICO).
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
