After two decades of drastic neoliberal reconfiguration, Peruvian elites approached the April 2016 general election comforted by the fact that ten of the twelve candidates shared — albeit with some minor differences — the same economic strategy.

But against all expectations, leftist Veronika (“Vero”) Mendoza’s third-place finish in the first round forced a ballotage between the favorite Keiko Fujimori and Pedro Pablo Kucynski, who until then was considered a dark horse. Scheduled for early June, the presidential runoff turned into the hardest-fought campaign in recent Peruvian history.

Fujimori, daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, imprisoned for human right abuses and embezzlement, was twenty points ahead of Kucynski — a former investment banker, World Bank functionary, and state minister — in April. But in a remarkable victory Kucynski won the June election by just 42,597 votes.