The candidate of the far-right party Fuerza Popular, Keiko Fujimori, is emerging as the winner in the second round of the presidential elections in Peru held this Sunday, having gathered 52.7% of the votes, according to the count by the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE), which has already reached 52.2% of the tallied ballots.
With these provisional data, Fujimori is ahead, although with a narrow margin, of the leftist candidate of Juntos por el Perú, Roberto Sánchez, who has so far garnered 42.2% of the votes, according to the official figures released by the ONPE.
The electoral day took place between 7:00 AM and 5:00 PM (2:00 PM and 12:00 AM in mainland Spain), with the installation of 92,766 polling stations throughout the country, according to information provided by the electoral authorities. Of this total, 2,260 polling stations were located in the region of Metropolitan Lima and in the constitutional province of Callao, areas where serious logistical setbacks related to the distribution of electoral material were recorded in the first round.
In this second round, the president of the National Jury of Elections (JNE), Roberto Burneo, has emphasized in a press conference that "there has been no fraud" in the development of the elections and that "everything has been duly carried out."
"We categorically deny any narrative of fraud or that seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process that has taken place," Burneo stated, immediately calling for "responsibility" from government authorities, electoral bodies, political organizations, and citizens as a whole.
More than 27 million Peruvians were called to vote in these presidential elections, in an operation in which numerous embassies and consulates remained open outside the national territory. The census includes 1,210,813 citizens residing abroad with the right to vote, which required a specific deployment to guarantee their participation.