Depending on how you count the interim and impeached leaders who've cycled through the Peruvian palace since 2016, Keiko Fujimori is either the ninth or the tenth person to hold the job in a decade — a number that says more about Peru's revolving-door politics than about anything in her own agenda.
Fujimori used her inaugural address to frame her presidency less as a set of promises and more as a stopwatch. She told Congress that exactly 1,826 days remained in her term — the precise length of five years — and closed her remarks by declaring, "the clock has started running." The newly elected president outlined seven national objectives, with organized crime and the looming El Niño weather pattern declared the two most urgent.
Raising Wages, Watching the Books
On the economic side, Fujimori announced the minimum monthly wage would climb from S/1,130 — unchanged since January 2025 — to S/1,300, roughly $350. She paired that with a one-time subsidy aimed at small and micro businesses to cushion the added payroll cost, arguing formal jobs and viable companies need to expand together. No effective date has been set, so for now this is a stated commitment rather than a signed decree.
She also pledged to double the twice-monthly Pensión 65 stipend for low-income seniors, from S/350 to S/700, and said her first hundred days would bring back the PROMYPE small-business program, expand credit through state development bank COFIDE, and grow the MYPerú public-purchasing initiative. For investors, her pitch leaned less on new incentives and more on consistency: fewer bureaucratic hurdles and rules that hold steady over time.
Soldiers on the Streets: Fujimori's Security Emergency
Security consumed the rest of her remarks. Fujimori announced that the armed forces would temporarily take charge of internal order in any zone placed under a state of emergency, working alongside the National Police rather than replacing it, in territory she describes as having slipped into the hands of organized crime, illegal mining, and drug trafficking. She's requesting delegated legislative powers from Congress so she can govern by emergency decree rather than wait on the normal legislative calendar, and her government plans to coordinate with prosecutors and judges on an overhaul of criminal procedure and prison policy. On the campaign trail she pointed to El Salvador's Nayib Bukele as a model, floating a Cecot-style megaprison and a system letting judges in organized-crime cases keep their identities confidential.
The urgency isn't manufactured. Peru's national statistics agency put the 2025 homicide rate at 10.7 per 100,000 people, continuing a steady climb from 8.6 in 2021 through 9.3 in 2023 and 10.1 in 2024 — even as police officials point to a modest quarter-over-quarter dip. Extortion tells a starker story: business association data found reported cases hit 64.7 per 100,000 residents in 2024, a 438% surge from 2019's rate of 12, concentrated among transport workers and small business owners. That number has since moved again — Peru's Ministerio Público now reports the 2025 full-year rate reached 82.4 per 100,000, a further 25.6% jump. Analysts have also flagged that the gap between police records, prosecutors' counts, and official government tallies routinely runs into the thousands of cases, a discrepancy likely to shadow Fujimori's own crime statistics for the rest of her term.
The Economy She's Inheriting
Whatever Fujimori does next lands on an economy best described as stable but underwhelming, and unevenly shared. Growth forecasts for 2026 vary by source: the IMF projects 2.8%, the OECD estimates 2.9%, and the World Bank is the most optimistic at 3.1% — all well below the 5%-plus expansions Peru routinely posted in the 2000s and 2010s. Inflation forecasts likewise split, with the IMF at 2.5% and the World Bank closer to 3%, both within the central bank's target range. Public debt sits around 30.2% of GDP and the fiscal deficit has narrowed toward 2%, evidence of the fiscal discipline Peru has sustained across sharply different governments for two decades.
Unemployment depends heavily on which survey you trust: the national statistics institute's household survey put it at 4.8% nationally, while urban-focused labor tracking has shown figures nearer 6.8%. The deeper issue isn't whether Peruvians have work — it's what kind. The same national survey found that roughly 70% of employed workers operate informally, without contracts, health coverage, or pension contributions — a share that climbs past 94% in rural areas and nearly 85% among workers under 25. On taxes, formal businesses pay a 29.5% corporate rate, consumers face an 18% sales tax, and salaried workers sit on progressive brackets running from 8% to 30% above roughly S/38,500 in annual income — a structure that, combined with such widespread informality, leaves a narrow slice of the workforce carrying most of the tax load. Poverty, measured at $8.30 a day, stood at 36.2% in 2024 and is projected to ease only gradually toward roughly 33% by the end of 2026.
Courting Washington
Fujimori's foreign policy is arguably even more precarious than her domestic agenda. Days before taking office, she met with U.S. Ambassador Bernie Navarro, who conveyed a personal greeting from President Trump, and her choice for foreign minister, Carlos Espá, has been described by regional press as Washington-oriented — part of a broader rightward tilt across South America that the Trump administration has actively encouraged. The State Department congratulated her promptly after the runoff was certified.
But decades of trade economics cut against any full pivot toward the U.S. Bloomberg-cited figures show China accounts for roughly 36% of Peru's foreign trade versus 14% for the United States, with Chinese investment near $30 billion against $6.7 billion from Washington — a gap her own father helped widen through repeated visits to Beijing during his 1990s presidency and by steering Peru into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
The China Question Peru Can't Avoid
The clearest evidence of that dependence sits 80 kilometers north of Lima: the Chancay megaport, a deep-water terminal majority-owned by China's state shipping giant COSCO. It opened in 2024 on an investment that has grown toward $3.5 billion, is designed to eventually run 15 berths, and has already reshaped Pacific shipping routes between Asia and South America. Washington views it warily — U.S. officials have raised the possibility of eventual dual military use — and the Pentagon has approved up to $1.5 billion to relocate Peru's main naval base away from its current spot beside the commercial port at Callao, freeing that port to expand and compete more directly with Chancay. Fujimori has so far avoided taking sides outright, telling reporters during the campaign that her government would pursue what she called a pragmatic footing rather than automatic alignment with any single power — a line her advisers have kept repeating since.
Japan's Quieter Partnership
Japan occupies a far less contested lane in Fujimori's foreign policy, helped along by family history — the Fujimoris trace their roots to Kumamoto prefecture. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi sent a congratulatory letter pledging deeper bilateral ties, and the day before the inauguration Fujimori met with Iwao Horii — Japan's State Minister for Foreign Affairs — to discuss disaster preparedness ahead of El Niño. Horii's Lima visit was one stop on a broader Latin American tour that continues on to Mexico, Panama, Ecuador, and Colombia.
A Full House of Regional Neighbors
Closer to home, Fujimori moved quickly to shore up ties with South America's newer conservative governments. She sat down with Bolivian President Rodrigo Paz on inauguration day, with both leaders citing the bicentennial of Peru-Bolivia relations as grounds for closer economic cooperation. She had already met Chile's José Antonio Kast during the campaign, and Kast, along with the presidents of Paraguay and Bolivia, attended the swearing-in ceremony in person, each publicly underscoring the value of continued dialogue with Lima. The Organization of American States' secretary-general, Albert Ramdin, also met with Fujimori around her swearing-in to discuss democratic institutions and shared regional challenges.
Where This Leaves Peru
Between a security emergency that hasn't yet stabilized, an economy that keeps growing without formalizing, and a foreign policy stretched between two rival superpowers, Fujimori's opening days point to a government trying to move on every front simultaneously. Whether her self-imposed 1,826-day countdown ends up as a kept promise or simply a deadline she blew past is, for now, anyone's guess.
