For a 15-year period starting in 2011 and only ending this very June, Peruvians witnessed a reality only fathomable in the thought experiments of political comparativists – four general elections with one single, shared, constant variable: the presence of Keiko Fujimori in every single second round. In every instance, Fujimori would be pitted against an increasingly diverse pool of adversaries: A left-leaning army officer in retirement, a liberal Wall Street banker, a radical left-wing teacher-turned-union leader and finally former left-wing congressman Roberto Sánchez.
Fujimori was defeated three times at the hands of these peculiar electoral foes. Discussing these defeats and the elusive nature of “anti-Fujimorism” lies beyond the purpose of this piece, though. Rather, it is the fact that she was still there to contest her fourth election in 2026 that needs explaining.
Fujimori’s party, Fuerza Popular (Popular Force), not only endured successive presidential defeats in 2011, 2016 and 2021 but further faced its own leader’s 16-month spell in “preventive” detention and a 10-year legal investigation into the party’s activities, all without dissolving or losing political prominence.
While Fuerza Popular and Fujimori would see their legal woes cleared after Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled the proceedings against them annulled in October 2025, the reputational damage they incurred is yet to wear off. In a country where parties habitually disappear along with the men whose ambitions founded them, the fact that Fujimori finally won the presidency in June with 50.1 per cent of the second-round vote is, to say the least, worth dwelling on. Something more durable than a mere personality-driven candidacy is at play here.
It’s in Fujimori’s success at having laid out the foundations of Fuerza Popular‘s strength that there is a lesson to be found for conservative movements across the globe, and she does not stand alone as a trendsetter. On September 4, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s administration became the longest-serving government since Italy was declared a republic in 1946, overtaking the 1,412 days of Silvio Berlusconi’s second government in 2001-2005.
On July 7, a Paris appeals court reduced Marine Le Pen’s effective electoral ban to time already served, allowing her to step back into the hotly contested race that France’s 2027 presidential election is promising to be.
Winning the presidency, remaining in government and surviving as a contender may all very well be different accomplishments. Yet Fuerza Popular, Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) and Rassemblement National (National Rally) share a capacity their critics have consistently underestimated or outright ignored: Staying put as a political organisation, while tedious and unglamorous, allowed them never to lose touch with their core constituencies – constituencies often scoffed at by elites.
Sociologist Frank Furedi, executive director of the MCC Brussels think tank, offers us a clear way into understanding this reality. On May 20, at the Brussels launch of his most recent book, In Defence of Populism, he described a demand for representation that existed long before any politician truly arrived to exploit it.
He identified a double betrayal: The distancing and derision displayed by elites towards inherited national values and myths, and establishment parties’ abandonment of the people they claim to represent. The insult compounds the abandonment. A voter may be materially insecure and, at the same time, perfectly aware that the institutions claiming to represent him regard his instincts and beliefs as backwards or pig-headed.
There is, to my mind, an obvious moral obligation at play here. People are entitled to defend the country and way of life they recognise, the authority that protects their family and the modest property that makes them truly free. Treating the voters’ attachment to these as pathologies has left many a so-called “right of centre” party apologising for the very principles they allegedly exist to conserve.
Furedi’s defence of national sovereignty supplies us with a key argument: People need a political community within which their judgement carries authority. A nation governed permanently in rejection of its history, principles and beliefs will eventually lead to an electoral answer to this glaringly obvious problem.
The three parties at hand, all in their own way, provide their electorates with such an answer. In Peru, Fuerza Popular explicitly draws upon the recovery of social order and economic prosperity accomplished by Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s after a decade of left-wing terrorism and utter economic collapse.
In Italy, Fratelli d’Italia placed national identity and the family at the centre of political life after 15 years of decline-management handled by out-of-touch elites. In France, Rassemblement National has sought to reinvigorate the promise of national sovereignty in a day and age characterised by mass migration.
All three parties, while stemming from undeniably different traditions and realities, face the very same forbidden fruit – the temptation to purchase respectability by ceasing to truly and meaningfully represent anything that may make their voters undesirable company at the liberal dinner table.
While in government some compromises will always prove necessary, a political Right that accepts that attachment to national values and accomplishments is worthy of shame, or that all forms of authority are inherently suspect, has essentially conceded the argument before even negotiating over policy.
Meloni must govern without dissolving her party’s purpose into mere administration. Le Pen must seek to broaden her appeal while keeping it authentic and recognisable. Fujimori must prove that order is something she can deliver in government, not merely promise from the campaign trail.
For many Peruvian families, Fujimorism as a political movement remains inextricably linked to the end of hyperinflation and the defeat of the Shining Path, a left-wing terrorist organisation responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands across the 1980s and 1990s. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission attributed to the group 54 per cent of the 69,280 deaths and disappearances it estimated for 1980-2000.
Expecting the millions of Peruvians who subscribe to a worldview that sees the deeds of Fujimorism as achievement to discard these memories because high-minded respectable opinion has reached contrary historical verdicts strikes me as a woefully incurious way to approach democratic politics.
Take the case of Peru’s shopkeepers. An estimated 15 to 20 per cent of the country’s street-front small businesses are currently forced to pay extortion money to violent gangs – among the more than 500,000 bodegas alone, somewhere between 75,000 and 100,000 corner shops – as the country faces its worst security crisis in decades.
What they want protected is the independence that 30 years of work bought them. For them, order and freedom are the two pillars of daily life. Intellectuals denigrating the importance of order have little business lecturing them on their political preferences.
Their circumstances might be different from those of Italian parents concerned about cultural continuity or French workers demanding control over immigration, yet the wish to preserve something worth having runs through each. Furedi’s argument begins with this demand, which precedes the leader who gives it expression. A party takes root when it treats such voters as capable of judgement and gives them somewhere to turn without first requiring an apology for what they believe.
Belonging sustains commitment through both time and defeat in ways that political expediency simply cannot. What distinguishes these parties, then, is the persistence of a constituency that has refused to be argued out of existence.
Furedi explains why denunciation has proved such a poor substitute for representation, yet I’d argue in favour of pushing further: The Right should accept responsibility for giving those loyalties institutional permanence. Endurance matters because families and nations live on a timescale longer than the next campaign.
