Georgetown Americas Institute

The conversation unfolded in the immediate aftermath of a presidential runoff whose outcome remained unresolved at the time of the event, providing a uniquely charged backdrop for a wide-ranging discussion of democratic consolidation, institutional fragility, and the structural conditions behind a decade of political instability.

A Record of Continuity — and Its Limits

Tuesta situated Peru's democratic experience in historical perspective. For the first time in its republican history, Peru completed six consecutive presidential electoral cycles since the fall of Alberto Fujimori's regime in 2000 — the longest uninterrupted period of formal democratic continuity in the country's history. Yet he cautioned against reading this record as evidence of democratic consolidation.

The period has two distinct phases: a first one from 2001 to 2016 in which three successive governments — those of Alejandro Toledo, Alan García, and Ollanta Humala — completed their mandates under minority governance but relative stability; and a second phase from 2016 to the present defined by acute crisis, in which eight presidents have held office across a single decade.

Economic Growth Paired With Political Instability

A central paradox of Peru's recent history, Tuesta argued, is the coexistence of sustained macroeconomic performance with progressive political deterioration. Since the mid-1990s, Peru has maintained notable rates of economic growth alongside significant reductions in poverty — a stability rooted largely in the macroeconomic architecture established under Fujimori's 1993 Constitution.

However, this economic success was not matched by political institution-building. Rather than strengthening democratic governance, the period witnessed a steady degradation of the political system driven by the collapse of the party system, the rise of anti-political discourse, and the entrenchment of personalist and transactional forms of political organization that have deepened rather than diminished over time.

The Collapse of the Party System

Tuesta traced the origins of Peru's political fragmentation to the Fujimori era, when Alberto Fujimori emerged as Latin America's first major outsider candidate, exploiting and accelerating the implosion of the country's established parties in the late 1980s. Rather than rebuilding a competitive party system after his fall, subsequent decades saw the proliferation of what Tuesta termed vientres de alquiler — loosely, "surrogate" party vehicles with no genuine organizational base, used primarily to commercialize political access.

The result is a system characterized by extreme personalism and what Tuesta described as a pattern of electoral self-destruction: parties that win the presidency routinely collapse before the governing term ends. Perú Posible, the APRA, the Partido Nacionalista, and Perú Libre all entered government with significant congressional blocs and exited with near-zero seats. No party other than Fujimorismo has managed to nominate two presidential winners, and none has demonstrated the durability needed to sustain governing coalitions. The 2025 election illustrated these dynamics vividly: thirty-eight organizations competed in the first round, and the two runoff candidates combined received only 29% of first-round votes.

Institutional Design Failures: The Vacancy Mechanism

A substantial portion of the conversation focused on the constitutional pathologies that have accelerated instability since 2016. Tuesta identified the weaponization of the vacancia — the presidential vacancy provision — as the central mechanism of Peru's governing crisis. Originally a nineteenth-century clause designed for objective circumstances such as the death or physical incapacitation of a president, the provision was revived and creatively reinterpreted in 2000 when Congress applied it against Fujimori on grounds of "permanent moral incapacity," invoking the clause's ethical rather than clinical dimension.

What felt like a useful solution to an extraordinary situation opened a constitutional Pandora's box. The mechanism was used by congressional majorities as a routine instrument of political removal, requiring only two-thirds of legislators to unseat a sitting president, and setting off a cascade of instability: Martín Vizcarra's removal, the serial vulnerability of his successors, and ultimately Pedro Castillo's self-defeating autogolpe in December 2022 — an attempted dissolution of Congress that he undertook on the very day he faced a vacancy vote, and which instead led immediately to his arrest.

The structural result has been what Tuesta characterized as hypopresidentialism: an executive so weakened by congressional pressure, threats of vacancy, and the censure of ministers and cabinets that effective governance has become nearly impossible, inverting what scholars in other contexts have called Latin American hyperpresidentialism.

Electoral Uncertainty and the Discourse of Fraud

With the runoff result still unresolved at the time of the event, Tuesta assessed the electoral situation with measured caution. Both candidates — Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez — had secured only around 17% and 13% of first-round votes, respectively, meaning that whoever won the presidency would do so with a strikingly thin democratic mandate.

Tuesta noted that fraud claims have become a recurring feature of Peruvian political competition since Fujimori refused to accept her narrow second-round defeat in 2016 and paralyzed Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's government from the legislature. The pattern intensified in 2021, when organized networks of disinformation — locally dubbed fraudistas — mounted an aggressive campaign against Pedro Castillo's electoral victory, inflicting lasting damage on public trust in electoral institutions, including ONPE, which had previously enjoyed two decades of high institutional credibility. Tuesta acknowledged that the administration of the 2025 runoff had been assessed as procedurally sound by international observation missions from the OAS, the European Union, and the Carter Center, which he believed would constrain, but not eliminate, rhetoric about fraud from the losing party.

Governing Scenarios and the Prospects for Reform

Looking ahead, Tuesta outlined two difficult scenarios for governing. A Fujimori presidency would benefit from relative congressional alignment — Fuerza Popular holds the largest bloc in both chambers — but would carry the weight of high public expectations, a clientelist political inheritance, and potential boomerang effects from the legislation that her party's congressional majorities had pushed through during recent opposition periods. A Sánchez presidency would face a hostile right-wing congressional majority while attempting to govern from a coalition whose internal contradictions — spanning Castrista social movements, Antaurista ethnonationalism, and center-left forces — would make coherent policy-making deeply challenging. In either case, Tuesta argued, the structural conditions for stable governance remain absent.

On the question of constitutional reform, he expressed skepticism toward the left's longstanding demand for a constituent assembly, arguing that the conditions for a high-quality constitutional deliberation do not currently exist. The quality of congressional debate has deteriorated significantly, transversal criminal and informal economic interests operate across party lines, and the 1993 Constitution's economic chapter remains a near-untouchable fault line around which political forces have organized for three decades. Peru has already amended roughly 40% of its constitutional articles through ordinary congressional modification, and has now restored bicameralism — electing its first Senate since Fujimori abolished the upper chamber in 1992 — but Tuesta concluded that deeper structural reform remains politically foreclosed for the foreseeable future.