Sánchez holds slight lead over Fujimori in tight Peru presidential race

Peru's presidential election hangs in the balance as the vote count nears completion, with Roberto Sánchez maintaining a razor-thin lead over Keiko Fujimori. With 96.02% of ballots processed, Sánchez has secured 50.05% of the vote, amounting to 8,914,029 ballots. Fujimori trails closely with 49.94%, or 8,893,751 votes, leaving a minimal difference of 20,278 votes, or 0.112 percentage points.

Approximately 2,140 electoral acts remain unprocessed, alongside 1,548 contested ballots sent to special electoral juries for review. A significant portion of the outstanding votes comes from Peruvians abroad, a factor that could sway the final result. Currently, about 30% of the 2,543 polling stations in 73 countries have been counted, showing a trend favoring Fujimori, who has garnered nearly 70% of these international votes.

Fujimori's campaign team is optimistic that the pending results, especially those from overseas and the contested ballots, will be decisive. They point out that many of the contested ballots originate from the capital, where their candidate performed better than Sánchez, who ran under the Juntos por el Perú alliance linked to former President Pedro Castillo. Fujimori's party, Fuerza Popular, emphasizes the extremely tight margin, calling it a technical tie and urging patience for the final official results.

Meanwhile, Sánchez's team is backing projections from private pollsters based on rapid counts, which indicate his victory by a small margin. Ernesto Zunini, secretary-general of Juntos por el Perú, cited Ipsos and Datum as placing Sánchez as the winner, though he also questioned statements from Ipsos Peru's CEO suggesting a potential Fujimori win. The election has mobilized over 27.3 million citizens.