Lima, Peru – In 1994, Peruvian strongman Alberto Fujimori offered his daughter Keiko an important job. She was 19, her parents were divorcing, and the country was still shocked by her mother's accusation that her father had ordered secret agents to torture her.
It was at that juncture that she faced a question: Would Keiko be her father's new first lady?
She accepted, and Keiko Fujimori has been making headlines ever since.
Over the past three decades, Peru has watched as she has grown from the bubbly teenager who once painted the presidential palace pink into a formidable opposition leader who commands the country's most powerful party.
She has been a rare constant in Peru's topsy-turvy politics, helping to topple one foe after another while installing allies in key government roles, from the attorney general's office to the ombudsman.
Winning the presidency, however, has proven more elusive. Despite running for the top job in the previous three elections, Keiko has lost in run-offs to lesser-known candidates each time.
Her critics joke she is so unpopular that she would lose if her rival were a loaf of paneton, an Italian-style sweet bread consumed at Christmas.
This year, however, she appears well positioned to finally secure a win in Sunday's run-off election. Her performance was better than expected in the first round of voting on April 12, and polls for most of the race gave her a lead over her leftist rival, Roberto Sanchez.
But as Sanchez moderated his platform in the last week of campaigning, her lead disappeared, according to a poll on Thursday from the research firm Ipsos.
With the two still neck and neck, Sunday's presidential election could go either way.
"Keiko, Keiko, aways Keiko," said Eduardo Salazar, 35, a hospital worker in Lima, as he reflected on her serial appearances in Peru's presidential races.
Ever since Salazar was old enough to vote, Keiko has been on the ballot. And each time, he said, he has voted for her opponent.
This year, however, Salazar said he was still unsure which candidate was “the lesser evil”, the criteria by which many disaffected Peruvians make up their minds.
"I think her father, while he did some good things, was bad for the country overall, and I think she wants to be like her father. But I almost want to vote for her this time so she stops trying," he said.
"Because she's not going to let the country move forward without her."
But Keiko faces distinct hurdles in her campaign to be Peru's next president. She has struggled to connect with certain sectors of the public, particularly rural and Indigenous communities.
Unlike the elder Fujimori, a charismatic political outsider raised by working-class Japanese immigrants, Keiko was raised in relative privilege.
She went to university in the United States, earning degrees in business administration, and married her college sweetheart, an Italian American entrepreneur. (They divorced in 2022.)
After her father’s government collapsed at the turn of the century, Keiko inherited his small but loyal right-wing populist movement.
Many Peruvians credit her father, who died in 2024, with ending a painful economic crisis and quashing a leftist rebellion that had long plagued the country.
"I'll always vote for Keiko. Why? Because Fujimori was the best president Peru has ever had," said Lorena Aviles, a 58-year-old homemaker. "How many presidents have come and gone since he left? What did they do? Nothing."
Aviles said she is sceptical that Keiko could be as effective a leader as her father, but she believes the right-wing candidate deserves a chance. She also dismissed the backlash against Keiko as sexism.
“She was right about a lot of things, but the left will never admit it," Aviles said.
While Keiko, now 50, has spent most of her career defending her father, she has, at times, sought to distance herself from him.
After resigning the presidency in 2000, Alberto Fujimori was charged with crimes against humanity, including extrajudicial killings and the forced sterilisation of Indigenous peoples.
He was arrested five years later, in 2005, after a period of exile.
While Keiko has crafted a political career hinged, in part, on nostalgia for her father's hardline government, she has acknowledged there were "crimes" committed under his watch.
But throughout his imprisonment, she nevertheless pushed for her father's release.
She and her party, the Fuerza Popular (FP), have also successfully championed legislation to grant amnesty to police and military members involved in crimes during Alberto Fujimori's time in power.
“Keiko represents impunity. Everything she does is to shield her people from crimes,” said Gloria Hurtado, a shopkeeper who plans to vote for Sanchez. “Imagine if she were president. We’d be going backwards.”
This year, Keiko has again leaned into her father’s memory, casting herself as the only candidate who can guarantee stability.
“Either we do something now to fix our country, or we repeat the same recipe that already failed," Keiko said at the May 31 presidential debate. "Order or chaos. These are the two options our country faces today.”
Once dogged by questions about supporting her father, Keiko now has a controversial record of her own to defend.
She has been put in pre-trial detention three times over a money-laundering investigation, though a court last year tossed the case, deeming it to be "flawed".
After her 2021 election defeat, she also spent weeks trying to overturn the results by making baseless claims of electoral fraud.
She has repeatedly used her party to wield the threat of impeachment in Congress, contributing to the political clashes that have given Peru nine presidents in the past decade.
Her critics say she is a sore loser, obsessed with control. Sanchez, her run-off opponent, calls her “Mrs Kaos”. He has accused her of abusing her power to pursue personal vendettas.
“Don't you realise the damage you’ve done to democracy? Impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment,” Sanchez told Keiko at the debate. “Instead of seeking development and stability, chaos and disorder has reigned.”
But this election cycle, Keiko is no longer the only candidate on the ballot carrying the baggage of questionable political associations.
In 2022, leftist President Pedro Castillo attempted a self-coup ahead of an impeachment vote. He announced he would dissolve Congress, seize the courts and rule by decree.
For many Peruvians, the televised speech was eerily reminiscent of Alberto Fujimori's own self-coup in 1992, which suspended Peru's democracy as he consolidated power.
Except, in Castillo's case, he lacked the broad military support Fujimori enjoyed. Castillo was arrested and impeached within hours.
Sanchez, Castillo’s former trade and tourism minister, initially condemned the attempted power grab. He has also denied advance knowledge of it.
But he now claims Castillo is a victim of political persecution and has promised to pardon him, inviting several of his family members to run for Congress with his party.
Ahead of the first round of voting, Sanchez also struck an alliance with Antauro Humala, a homophobic ethnic nationalist and former army officer known for wanting to execute former presidents — including his brother, Ollanta Humala.
Sanchez has since distanced himself from Antauro, though.
Those positions have changed the calculus for many Peruvians who identify as part of the "democratic right".
Rafael Belaunde, a centre-right politician, is among them. He recently endorsed Keiko for the run-off, despite his long-standing opposition to her father.
"Twenty-five years ago, I was marching in the streets against her father's dictatorship," said Belaunde. "But that's life. You have to make decisions based on what you're dealt."
The decision, though, prompted multiple resignations from Belaunde's party, Libertad Popular.
Belaunde has stood by his choice. He fears the repercussions of one of Sanchez's campaign promises: to ditch the 1993 constitution Alberto Fujimori implemented after seizing power.
The constitution is famously business-friendly, cementing Peru's free-market economy. But Sanchez has signalled he would like the state to have a greater role in industry and commerce.
Belaunde said a rewrite could jettison one of the few things Peru has going for it: decades of stable growth and tame inflation. “It would be fatal for Peru's economic progress, especially for the poorest people.”
With centrists nervous about Sanchez, analysts say this year’s race gives Keiko her best shot yet at winning.
A surge in violent crime in recent years has fuelled demand for the kind of iron-fisted leadership she has long promised, and more Peruvians now identify as right-leaning than left.
Keiko also offers something Sanchez cannot: political durability. Her party continues to be a powerful force in Peruvian politics, which could insulate her presidency from congressional backlash.
"If she wins, Peru will have a president until 2031," said political scientist Mauricio Zavaleta. "In a country where so many presidents have been impeached, she's the only one with enough power to finish her term."
Whether most Peruvians view that as a strength or a weakness remains to be seen. Win or lose, critics see Keiko as a living reminder of how populist, authoritarian movements can shape a country's politics long after their leaders have fallen.
"I do think she wants to subvert constitutional norms and the rule of law. That's just how she has acted and how she has used her power in Congress," said Zavaleta.
But he added that another Fujimori dictatorship is unlikely.
"To build an authoritarian regime anywhere in the world through elections, the leader needs to be popular — and I honestly can't imagine Keiko Fujimori ever being popular," he said.
A more likely outcome, he explained, is a mediocre presidency that ends her political career, as it has for every Peruvian leader this century.
"The presidency is the grave for all Peruvian politicians who reach it."
<small>Source: Al Jazeera</small>
