Keiko Fujimori inherits the two-chamber Congress her father abolished — and a right-wing bloc with two-thirds of both houses

Keiko Fujimori was sworn in as president of Peru on Tuesday, 28 July, the country’s independence day and the date its constitution reserves for presidential transitions, after winning the runoff on 7 June. She takes office alongside an institution Peru has not had for thirty-four years: a Congress with two chambers, a Senate of 60 and a Chamber of Deputies of 130, restored by referendum after her father, Alberto Fujimori, dissolved the previous bicameral legislature in the 1992 self-coup and the 1993 constitution replaced it with a single house.

Both chambers now publish their full membership as open data, and the rosters were populated in the week before the handover. Counting them gives the arithmetic the new president has to work with. In the Senate: Fuerza Popular 22, Juntos por el Perú 14, Renovación Popular 8, Partido del Buen Gobierno 7, Partido Cívico Obras 5, Ahora Nación 4. In the Chamber of Deputies: Fuerza Popular 41, Juntos por el Perú 32, Partido del Buen Gobierno 18, Renovación Popular 15, Partido Cívico Obras 14, Ahora Nación 10. Every one of the 190 records carries the parliamentary period 2026–2031.

Fujimori’s own party holds 63 of those 190 seats, a third of the legislature, and a majority in neither chamber. She is nine votes short in the Senate, where 31 constitutes a majority, and twenty-five short in the Chamber, where it takes 66. On its own, Fuerza Popular cannot pass a budget.

The more consequential number is what happens when the four right-leaning blocs are counted together. Fuerza Popular, Renovación Popular, Partido del Buen Gobierno and Partido Cívico Obras hold 42 of 60 seats in the Senate and 88 of 130 in the Chamber. Two-thirds of those chambers is 40 and 87. Both thresholds are cleared, in both houses, on the first day — which is the margin that matters for constitutional reform and for removing officials, and which no wire account of a “right-leaning Congress” has actually put a number on. Whether it functions as a bloc is a different question from whether it exists on paper; these are four parties, not a coalition, and Peruvian congressional alliances have historically been brittle.

The Senate is not elected the way the Chamber is, and the difference shows up in who won. Thirty senators are chosen from a single national district and thirty regionally — Lima Metropolitana returns four, every other region one, and Peruvians abroad one. That means half the upper house is effectively single-winner seats. Peru’s parity and alternation rules, written for list elections when the country had only one chamber, are designed to force women into winnable positions on a list; they cannot do that where a region elects a single senator.

The result is two chambers picked on the same day under the same law with markedly different compositions. Sixteen of the 60 senators are women, 26.7%. In the Chamber of Deputies it is 53 of 130, or 40.8% — a gap of just over fourteen points. Across the whole Congress, 69 of 190 members are women, 36.3%, well short of the parity the rules were meant to deliver. The variation between parties is wide, from Partido del Buen Gobierno at 52% to Partido Cívico Obras at 26%, but the chamber gap holds across the spectrum, which points at the electoral system rather than at any one party’s list.

Two deputies had still not been sworn in when the rosters were published, both listed as elected rather than serving: Henry Antonio Albañil Carmona of Partido Cívico Obras, for Piura, and Fernando Alberto García Huby of Partido del Buen Gobierno, for Callao.

The context for restoring the second chamber is a decade of institutional churn. Peru has been through a run of presidents removed, resigned or arrested since 2016, and the single-chamber Congress’s power to declare the presidency vacant on grounds of “permanent moral incapacity” was the instrument in several of those exits. A bicameral legislature was sold to voters as a brake on that. It arrives, on its first day, with a governing party too small to legislate and an ideological bloc large enough to rewrite the constitution — and with the daughter of the president who abolished the last one taking the oath in front of it.