APRIL 12-13, 2026: ON THE NEW REACTIONARY ELECTORAL FARCE IN PERU
We hereby share a note on the recent electoral farce in Peru published by Association of New Democracy – Germany (Nuevo Peru) on April 16th. We have made some grammatical corrections.
IN OUR COUNTRY AS IN ALL COUNTRIES OF LANDLORD-BUREAUCRATIC DICTATORSHIP OR THOSE OF BOURGEOIS DICTATORSHIP, ELECTIONS ARE A FARCE.
ELECTORAL FRAUD IS THE NORM AS SHOWN ONCE AGAIN IN THE GENERAL ELECTIONS FOR REPLACEMENT OF AUTHORITIES OF THE OLD PERUVIAN STATE.
On April 12 of this year, elections were held in Peru, or actually not, as the elections could not be carried out in a single act as required by the reactionary law and the presidential call for its implementation itself, but rather had to be completed the next day, April 13, and which final results have not been made known until today.
35 presidential candidates from so-called political Parties and nearly 10,000 candidates for Parliament and the Senate participate in these elections. Among these Fuerza Popular, Renovación Popular, Avanza País, etc. of the comprador faction of the big bourgeoisie and 3 of revisionists and opportunists (Perú Libre, Juntos por el Perú, Venceremos), which promote the program of the bureaucratic faction of the big bourgeoisie, and then a long list of others.
The reactionary political and electoral landscape seems like something out of a surrealist country, but no! It is characteristic of the general and final crisis afflicting the old semi-colonial and semi-feudal society, within which bureaucratic capitalism operates, along with the old State that represents and defends it. This old society and its State, amidst massive genocides, resist being swept away by the People’s War led by the PCP, which began on May 17, 1980, and which, despite the turn in the road it currently faces, will continue until it culminates in the seizure of power throughout the country.
The current regime to which this electoral landscape belongs expresses this general crisis in this arena. A fascist, genocidal, and country-selling regime established in April 1992 by Fujimori’s coup d’état directed by the CIA-USA, which to this day heads the Peruvian state, the dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie and landlords in the service of imperialism—mainly Yankee imperialism, as was to be expected—has been in terminal crisis since 2016, the year in which Ollanta Humala (2011 and 2016) was the last president to complete his term. Since then, seven presidents have been deposed by coups d’état.
On this occasion, the fraud has broken all records for electoral scandals, thereby consummating the fraud that is, by its very nature, inherent in such “democratic” events. So much so that the “legitimacy” of these elections to replace the authorities of the old Peruvian State—both in the Executive and the Bicameral Congress—has been denied not only because of their essential nature as a means to determine who will be the representatives of this class dictatorship to oppress those below from the Executive and Parliament, but has also been denounced by various reactionary media outlets and figures as a flawed process. Flawed by the very actions of the authorities and institutions themselves in conducting them in accordance with their fraudulent Constitution and laws—that is, the rules by which the players of this game or electoral farce are governed have not been respected. From its own call by the government of the genocidal Dina, a government emanating from a coup d’état, to the National Jury of Elections (the highest electoral authority) and the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE) headed by Piero Corvetto, who, along with other ONPE officials, is responsible for violating the terms and procedures for the exercise of the so-called “popular will” which, according to the law of the reactionaries, “taint the democratic election” of the authorities. In this regard, we quote verbatim an editorial from a reactionary newspaper, which states:
“The numerous irregularities that occurred before, during, and after Election Day justify these requests and cast a shadow over a process that should be beyond reproach. From the indefensible choice of the Galaga company to transport election materials to the lack of ink for printers at polling stations, not to mention the failures of the STAE system and the false claim made a few days earlier that all election materials had already been delivered to the polling stations in a timely manner, everything conspired against the legitimacy of the election (…) The big question is what will be done to repair the damage they have caused to these elections in particular and to democracy in general.”
(The isolated “errors” and the numerous irregularities recorded on Sunday’s election day tarnish the image of the electoral system. Editorial, El Comercio, April 16, 2026)
Of course, not all of these complainants are entirely disinterested—many of them are simply parroting the arguments of the candidate known as Porky López Aliaga—but we are relaying them to you because, in this reactionary contest among the election riggers, when the fraud they have orchestrated turns against them, the cat is out of the bag. In the same vein, Donald Trump denounced the nomination of his opponent Joe Biden as fraudulent, thereby denouncing the fraudulent nature of the elections in the US, just like the ones that nominated him in 2016 and then in 2024. Chairman Mao told us that we must pay close attention to the fight among the reactionaries, because it is like when friends fight—their dirty laundry comes out into the open; there, many truths emerge that can be used against them. That is why we now transcribe two points from an opinion piece by a not-so-disinterested or impartial constitutionalist, who says:
“Pedro P. Grández Castro – Professor of Constitutional Law, Peruvian Society of Constitutionalists (SPC)
I. A Ballot That Foretold Chaos
In this very column, I have referred to the “confusion” that the ballot seemed destined to cause. We experienced it all too clearly on Sunday the 12th: a ballot measuring 44 centimeters wide by 21 centimeters long, with five columns for five simultaneous elections and 37 competing organizations. The document that millions of Peruvians had to decipher is not just a ballot of unprecedented dimensions; it is an exact portrait of the collapse of a party system and the commercialization of representative offices.
The diagnosis is simple. The elimination of open, simultaneous, and mandatory primary elections caused the number of registered parties to skyrocket, opening the door to organizations that would never have passed the filter in any previous process. Without mechanisms for real representation, the ballot becomes a catalog of fragmentation. No organization exceeded 10% in the latest polls: an electoral architecture designed, consciously or not, so that power can be conquered by margins that in any healthy democracy would be irrelevant. The groups that crafted these rules knew what they were doing.
II. The ONPE’s Shortcomings and the Fraud Strategy
The election day began with real problems. The JNE extended voting hours until 6 p.m. due to delays in the distribution of election materials. The ONPE acknowledged the delays and attributed them to the failure of the contracted transportation company to fulfill its obligations. As of this writing, the head of the organization himself confirmed that more than 60,000 citizens were unable to vote because their polling stations were never set up. This is a serious violation of fundamental political rights, which demands an investigation and the imposition of sanctions.
But it is one thing to demand transparency and accountability, and quite another to exploit these failures as a pretext to attack the electoral institutions. In the middle of election day, Rafael López Aliaga filed a criminal complaint against the head of the ONPE, Piero Corvetto, accusing him of “dereliction of duty in a permanent state of flagrancy” and calling for his immediate arrest. The Presidency of the National Board of Justice—whose current head had previously been a congresswoman for one of the political groups that will not pass the threshold—announced in turn that it would request an investigation into Corvetto. By late afternoon, the chorus was unanimous: “electoral fraud.”
A candidate who, at the precise moment when citizens are voting, devotes his energy to calling for the arrest of the election official is not concerned with transparency; he is setting the stage for fraud, in case the results do not go his way. López Aliaga had already anticipated this: “Mr. Corvetto isn’t going to do to us what he did last time,” he declared during the campaign. The logistical deficiency is serious and must be fully investigated, with all its consequences. Turning it into proof of a conspiracy, without any evidence, is the policy of institutional destruction that we have already seen in the previous process.”
Updates will follow.
