The second and final round of Peru’s 2026 presidential election was razor close, with the victorious rightwing candidate Keiko Fujimori receiving 50.11 percent of the vote and the defeated leftwing candidate Roberto Sánchez receiving 49.89 percent. Not surprisingly, election maps reveal a country politically divided along geographical lines. The next several GeoCurrents posts will examine Peru’s electoral division, looking at its various dimensions. The current post considers the urban-rural split, which is essentially the opposite of what is found in the United States and most other wealthy countries. In the U.S., population density has recently become one of the best predictors of voting behavior, with rural areas and small, non-metropolitan cities favoring the right and highly urbanized areas favoring the left. In Peru’s 2026 presential election, the rightwing – or perhaps far-right – candidate, Keiko Fujimori, triumphed largely due to support from the country’s largest city.
This electoral population-density divide can be glimpsed in the maps posted below. The first shows that a substantial majority of Peru’s 1,838 districts voted for the losing candidate Sánchez, which indicates his substantial support in less-densely populated areas. The same map also show that most major cities supported Fujimori. But important exceptions to these generalizations are also revealed. As can easily be seen, Sánchez won in all the major cities of southern Peru. The following three-map set also indicates that Fujimori received some of her strongest support in extremely low-density districts in the far-eastern part of the country. Obviously, population density is not the only factor at play, as will be explored in later posts.
What really gave Fujimori her edge was her strong support in the Lima metro area, by far the largest urban area of the country. Roughly 35 percent of Peru’s people live in Lima and its adjacent port city, Callao, and she received roughly 64 percent of their votes, taking every district. As would be expected, Fujimori did especially well in the wealthiest neighborhoods, most of which are located near the urban core. These tendencies can be seen by locating the elite districts of San Isidro and Miraflores on the electoral map (see the map posted below). Not surprisingly, Fujimori took a smaller share of the vote in the poorest districts of Lima, which, according to AI, are Puscana and Puente Piedra. Yet she still received more than 60 percent of the vote in impoverished Puscana.
An urban shift to the right is also evident in left-voting southern Peru. Although Sánchez easily won Arequipa Department, taking 64 percent of its vote, the election was more evenly contested in the city of Arequipa, Peru’s second largest. As can be seen in the next map set, the central part of the city is mapped in a much lighter shade of green than its outskirts and adjacent rural areas. Fujimori won several districts near Arequipa’s urban core. She did especially well in Yanahuara, which, according to AI, is “one of the most affluent and desirable districts in Arequipa.” In Cusco, the second-largest city in southern Peru, Sánchez had better results, as Fujimori lost every district in Cusco Province (a subdivision of Cusco Department). But again, the city itself is a lighter shade of green than its outskirts. Here Fujimori’s best performance was in relatively well-off Wanchaq district. Her worst performance by a large margin was in Ccorca district, which, according to AI, “is characterized by Andean indigenous communities, subsistence agriculture, and limited urban development.”
In Peru, as in true in most of Latin America and indeed over much of the world, rural areas and small cities tend to have lower levels of social and economic development than large cities. As a result, it is not surprising that the less urbanized parts of Peru tend to support candidates on the left who seek redistribution of wealth and power. Yet it is also true that the poorer parts of Lima have low levels of economic development and pronounced poverty. As a result, I am surprised that they supported the rightwing candidate in the 2026 election. Clearly, other factors must also be considered.