“My father and I have talked and decided together that he will be the presidential candidate” in the elections scheduled for 2026, the leader of the neoliberal Popular Force party, Keiko Fujimori, wrote in X. She is facing a trial for corruption.

The message quotes a previous interview in which Fujimori daughter tells of having told her father that “If it is your will and your plan, it is up to me to support you, I started doing politics with you”.

The reactions started a legal and political battle due to the constitutional and legal hurdles that the candidacy means, to which analyst Juan de la Puente suggested the possibility that it is “a trial balloon in the face of the long trial” of Keiko.

Electoral expert Fernando Tuesta commented that, by announcing his father’s candidacy, in spite of everything, “it creates expectation and public attention”, which will place the issue on the political agenda.

He adds that if the 86-year-old ex president succeeds in registering his candidacy, the electoral court will declare it inadmissible, the pro-Fujimori party will protest and even talk about an alleged fraud, as it has done after its previous electoral defeats, and the candidate will be the vice presidential candidate, who would be Keiko.

The plan, he adds, would be to gain visibility and move on to the presidential runoff, pressuring the rest of the like-minded forces to line up behind Keiko Fujimori (as has happened in that instance in 2011, 2016 and 2021, without success), which Tuesta considers “a well thought-out strategy”.

Jurists of different tendencies pointed out that Fujimori Sr.’s candidacy is unfeasible and even the conservative former president of the Constitutional Court Ernesto Blume considered it incongruent that Fujimori, who was pardoned for humanitarian reasons due to illness, would try to run for a position that requires a good state of health. mh/arm/jf/mrs