Despite a concerted effort to create “democratic, clean, transparent and orderly” elections in Peru, with 8 presidents serving in office since 2018 and 35 candidates running for presidential election, the country still faces much political instability. The Associated Press reported on April 14th, two days after the initial elections, that no candidate secured an outright victory, forcing a June runoff whose two contenders remained uncertain at the time of the report. With 77% of the ballots casted counted, they show the top three contenders for the June runoff election: Keiko Fujimori, Roberto Sánchez, and Rafael López Aliaga. These three candidates, a daughter of an ousted authoritarian ruler, a union-backed leftist, and a far-right populist respectively, have illustrated the entrenched rivalries and repeated institutional breakdown that dominates Peruvian politics today.
The scholars we have engaged with have tended to focus on polarization and norm erosion as distinct threats to democracy. Instead, I would like to further analyze how polarization and norm erosion engage with one another and even fuel each other. In the case of Peru, they form a mutually-reinforcing feedback loop that makes democratic stabilization structurally impossible. By demonstrating how polarization erodes norms, how norm erosion deepens polarization, and why that loop is self-sustaining, it may highlight the ineffectiveness of elections alone for regaining democratic stability.
Levitsky and Ziblatt identify two foundational norms as guardrails of democracy: mutual toleration and forbearance. Mutual toleration requires that rivals accept one another as legitimate competitors. Forbearance requires that politicians restrain from using their institutional powers to the maximum, even when legally permitted to do so. McCoy, Rahman, and Somer define polarization as a process whereby normal differences in a society ‘align along a single dimension’ and politics becomes increasingly perceived in terms of ‘Us versus Them.’
The collapse of both norms can be observed in a single fracture point in Peru, specifically with Keiko Fujimori’s refusal to accept her 2016 electoral defeat, as described by Dr. Julio Carrión, a professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Delaware, on the LatinNews Podcast. Rather than conceding legitimacy to President-elect Kuczynski, Fujimori publicly declared she would “rule Peru from Congress,” where her party held nearly 73 of 130 seats. In treating her electoral rival as an illegitimate occupant of power, Fujimori not only clearly rejected mutual toleration, but she also activated what Levitsky and Ziblatt identify as the danger of viewing opponents as an existential threat. Once rivals are seen this way, “any means necessary” to defeat them becomes justifiable.
The result was the call for impeachment of Kuczynski by Congress for “moral incapacity” under Article 113 of the Constitution. While Kuczynski had received payments from the Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht during his time as finance minister, the impeachment was led by Keiko Fujimori’s Popular Force party, which itself was implicated in the same scandal over illegal campaign contributions. Dr. Carrión notes the charges “could have easily been investigated after his term,” suggesting Congress aimed for impeachment as an attack on opposition and not out of democratic principle. Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that political parties serve as democracy’s gatekeepers who are responsible for isolating antidemocratic actors before they cause institutional damage. In Peru, this gatekeeping function isn’t working because of the dismantling of the party system under ten years of Fujimori rule. It left no programmatic parties capable of resisting the congressional majority and without gatekeepers willing to defend democratic norms over partisan gain, Fujimori’s coalition faced no meaningful resistance when it chose to reject forbearance by weaponizing impeachment as a political tool.
What began as polarization eroding norms, then created conditions for those broken norms to deepen polarization further. Once Congress demonstrated that impeachment could be used as a political weapon, according to Dr. Carrión, upon taking office Vice President Martín Vizcarra understood he “needed to campaign against Congress” to survive. His presidency was explicitly marked by conflict between the executive and a corrupt legislative bloc, one that ended with the president dissolving Congress entirely.
Each escalation entrenched the “Us versus Them” logic McCoy, Rahman, and Somer identify as the hallmark of deep polarization: rather than competing over policy, political actors competed over who could more convincingly cast the other side as an existential threat to Peru itself. This meant that Peru turned into a parliamentary regime where presidents could only as long as they hold congressional confidence through aggressive coalitions of private interests, which ignore democratic mandate. Public trust has collapsed with Peruvians broadly having viewed the political class as uniformly corrupt and self-interested in recent years. Political fragmentation is so severe that, as Dr. Carrión calculates, the two 2021 runoff candidates (Castillo and Fujimori) together received less than 40% of first-round votes, meaning the majority of voters were forced to choose between candidates they had not initially supported. This is a product of the feedback loop between norm erosion and polarization.
Polarization has made it structurally impossible to build cross-cutting coalitions that might restore institutional norms, while the ongoing erosion of those norms continuously validates the cynicism that deepens polarization further. As long as political actors continue to treat every institutional tool as a legitimate weapon against their opponents, the trust needed to build programmatic parties capable of enforcing restraint cannot be rebuilt. Each election will continue to produce another iteration of the same cycle.
This fundamentally cuts right to one of the unique aspects of Peruvian democracy. Vengeance has been the name of the game in Peru at least as far back as PPK’s second-round campaign against Fujimori in 2016.
Described by Levitsky in 2018, Peru’s party system was one of “free agents.” This gets at the idea that the party system being hyper-fractionalized is both enforced by and enforcing the low voter alignment with a specific party. In the 2023 Latinobarómetro Peruvian voters showed an overwhelming lack of alignment with any specific party. The largest political alignment was 8.4% aligning with “right-wing parties.” Another 80% of voters fell to the “null or no party alignment” option.
While the breadth of the legislature is made up of politicians who will bounce around parties to get elected, ensuring party loyalty and discipline becomes increasingly difficult. These parties with weak discipline and loyalty require coalitions to be formed not based on ideological agreement, but mutual political benefit. The impact of this was no more evident than when PPK’s PPK party collapsed under the pressure of the Fuerza Popular bloc in 2018. A poorly trained squad of technocrats could not endure the establishment party’s experience. Even if no constitutional hardball had ever been played by FP and the Fujimorista bloc, the weakness of non-FP parties in Peru leaves the whole legislature open to wholesale capture.
Because of the weakness of the party system in Peru, vertical accountability has been fundamentally eroded. The lack of stable and competitive political parties worsens the grip FP has on the legislature and weakens the ability of opposition groups to check their overreaches. While norms in the legislature can promote strong party engagement from the electorate, the inverse is also true. If voters continue to avoid political organization from the bottom, political organization at the top will fail to accurately represent the will of the people.