Two Peruvian lawyers filed a criminal complaint Wednesday against conservative presidential candidate Rafael López Aliaga, demanding his immediate arrest on charges of "disruption of the electoral process" after he called for the annulment of Sunday's national elections and urged supporters toward what he termed an "insurgency."

The complaint, filed by lawyers Indira Rodríguez and Doller Huamán, came as López Aliaga, the former mayor of Lima and standard-bearer of the Popular Renewal party, watched his second-place finish erode vote by vote. With nearly 93 percent of ballots counted as of Thursday morning, leftist lawmaker Roberto Sánchez Palomino of the Together for Peru party had overtaken him by just 9,309 votes, a margin of 0.068 percent.

The legal maneuver lands in a country that has cycled through nine presidents in ten years and impeached three of them between December 2022 and February 2026. Peru does not need more instability. But the rush to criminalize a candidate's protest, before the votes are even fully counted, raises its own questions about who is threatening democratic order and who is defending it.

The election and the narrowing margin

Thirty-five candidates appeared on Sunday's presidential ballot. None came close to the 50-percent majority required to win outright, making a June runoff between the top two finishers a mathematical certainty. Conservative former first lady and senator Keiko Fujimori, daughter of the late President Alberto Fujimori, led the field with 17.065 percent of the vote, as Breitbart reported.

The real contest was for second place, and the right to face Fujimori in the runoff. When the National Office of Electoral Processes (ONPE) released its first round of results Monday, López Aliaga held the number-two spot. But as more ballots were tallied, Sánchez Palomino closed the gap and eventually passed him.

By Thursday morning, ONPE's official preliminary results page showed Sánchez Palomino at 1,879,206 votes (11.987 percent) and López Aliaga at 1,869,897 (11.919 percent). The count had not concluded.

That razor-thin difference, fewer than ten thousand votes separating a conservative from a leftist for a spot in the runoff, is the backdrop for everything that followed.

López Aliaga's protest and annulment demand

On Tuesday night, López Aliaga staged a peaceful protest outside the building of the National Elections Board (JNE) in Lima. He delivered a speech demanding the annulment of Sunday's vote. He gave electoral authorities a 24-hour deadline to, in his words, "declare this rubbish null and void."

His stated justification: logistical failures on election day. López Aliaga claimed that problems at polling stations left "over a million voters unable to vote." He pointed to the fact that 15 stations in Lima opened on Monday rather than Sunday. He called on supporters to mount an "insurgency", a word that would become the centerpiece of the legal complaint against him.

On Wednesday, he went further, offering ONPE workers a reward of 20,000 Peruvian soles, roughly $5,800, for "accurate and verifiable information regarding possible irregularities, fraud, or sabotage" in the election.

At press time Thursday, López Aliaga had not presented evidence of fraud.

The criminal complaint

Lawyers Rodríguez and Huamán filed their complaint Wednesday, and Peruvian outlet La República reported on it that night. LP reported that the lawyers called for López Aliaga's detention under what Peru's Criminal Code defines as "arrest in flagrante delicto", a legal mechanism typically reserved for suspects caught in the act of committing a crime.

The lawyers argued that López Aliaga's conduct "is not protected by freedom of speech, as it may undermine the right to vote and the country's stability."

That framing deserves scrutiny. A candidate who loses his place in a vote count, stages a peaceful protest, and demands that election authorities investigate irregularities is engaging in political speech, the kind democracies are supposed to protect, not prosecute. Whether his claims have merit is one question. Whether airing them constitutes a criminal act is a very different one.

The complaint did not appear to have resulted in an arrest by press time. What court or prosecutorial body received the filing, and what specific criminal statutes were cited beyond the "flagrante delicto" reference, remained unclear.

Fujimori responds

Keiko Fujimori, the frontrunner, did not align herself with López Aliaga's annulment push. But she also did not endorse the criminal complaint. Instead, she offered a measured rebuke, and extended an olive branch. Fujimori said representatives of her Popular Force party were at the disposal of both López Aliaga's and Sánchez Palomino's parties to "help clarify the facts and ensure that the truth prevails."

On the question of López Aliaga's rhetoric, she was direct. Fujimori stated:

"The results are going to be very close; it will come down to every single vote. I'm not going to respond to López Aliaga's insults, which, sadly, we've come to expect from him. But what we absolutely cannot allow is for an insurgency to be called for."

She followed that with a broader appeal to democratic norms:

"In a democracy and under the rule of law, those who lead political parties have a duty, above any personal interest, to preserve order and channel their grievances through established procedures and rules. Any other path leads to chaos, and we cannot accept that."

Fujimori's position amounted to a call for process over spectacle, a reasonable stance from a candidate who stands to benefit from a clean runoff. She criticized López Aliaga's language without calling for his imprisonment, a distinction the two lawyers apparently could not manage.

The OAS weighs in

The Organization of American States released a preliminary report describing Sunday's election as peaceful. The OAS offered recommendations aimed at avoiding logistical problems for the June runoff, an implicit acknowledgment that the election-day disruptions López Aliaga cited were real, even if his proposed remedy of annulment was extreme.

That detail matters. The logistical failures are not in dispute. Fifteen Lima polling stations opened a day late. López Aliaga's claim that over a million voters were unable to cast ballots has not been verified, but neither has it been formally rebutted. The question is whether those problems warrant a full annulment or targeted remedies, and whether a candidate who raises the issue loudly should face criminal prosecution for doing so.

A country that cannot afford more chaos

Peru's political instability is not abstract. Nine presidents in a decade. Three impeachments and removals in roughly three years. Interim President José María Balcázar is holding the office until July 28, when the winner of the runoff will take power.

Against that backdrop, every actor in this drama has reason to tread carefully. López Aliaga's call for "insurgency" was reckless language from a candidate who had other options, legal challenges, formal complaints to electoral authorities, demands for recounts. The word itself invited exactly the kind of legal and political backlash he now faces.

But the lawyers' response was its own form of escalation. Filing a criminal complaint and demanding the immediate arrest of a presidential candidate, while votes are still being counted, is not a defense of democratic stability. It is a use of the criminal justice system as a political weapon, aimed at silencing a competitor whose vote share is still being determined.

If López Aliaga's claims of fraud are baseless, the vote count will show it. If the logistical failures affected the outcome, election authorities have mechanisms to address that. Neither scenario requires putting a candidate in handcuffs for giving a speech.

What remains unresolved

Several questions hung over the situation as the count continued Thursday. Had prosecutors taken any action on the complaint? What specific evidence, beyond López Aliaga's public statements, did the lawyers submit? And what evidence, if any, would López Aliaga produce to support his fraud allegations?

The margin between López Aliaga and Sánchez Palomino, 9,309 votes out of millions cast, is small enough that the remaining ballots could still shift the order. If López Aliaga climbs back into second, the criminal complaint against the man heading into a runoff would look even more like a political operation than a legal one.

Peru's voters went to the polls on Sunday to choose their next leader. They deserve to have their ballots counted honestly and their candidates treated fairly, even the ones who make it harder by choosing the wrong words. Arresting a candidate for protesting is not how democracies prove they work. It is how they prove they don't.