When the National Jury of Elections ruled on 9 June that Peru's first-round presidential vote would not be annulled [9], it preserved the form of democratic process while doing nothing to address the substance. The runoff between Keiko Fujimori and Roberto Sánchez will proceed as scheduled [9], but the machinery of the state that ought to guarantee its legitimacy has already failed.
The conventional read treats this as an electoral drama: close margins, fraud allegations from Rafael López Aliaga (who now backs Fujimori [21]), pre-marked ballots discovered in polling stations [19], international observers called in by Human Rights Watch [2]. That framing assumes the institutions responsible for adjudicating such disputes retain the capacity to do so. They do not. President Boluarte's October 2025 impeachment [12, 16] was precipitated not by the usual procedural theatre of Peruvian politics but by the state's inability to prevent an attack on the cumbia group Agua Marina — a cultural institution that transcends partisan divides [15]. When a government cannot protect a beloved band from organised violence, it has lost the monopoly on force that underpins electoral legitimacy.