Miguel Torres was elected president of Peru’s Senate on Sunday with 30 votes out of 60, giving Keiko Fujimori’s Popular Force party a key post in the newly restored bicameral Congress just two days before her July 28 presidential inauguration.
Who Has the Power
Popular Force, led by President-elect Keiko Fujimori, won the Senate presidency in an alliance with the right-wing Popular Renewal party. Alejandro Muñante, a member of Popular Renewal, won the first vice presidency. The arrangement hands the incoming government a stronger grip on the legislature before Fujimori takes office for the 2026-2031 term. The lower house, with 130 deputies, is set to choose its leadership in the upcoming hours.
Torres took the post after a vote in a chamber split evenly down the middle. No political force holds a majority. That’s the setup Peru’s ruling class has handed itself: a fragmented Congress, a fresh presidency, and the same old scramble for control over the machinery of the state.
What They Call Stability
During his swearing-in ceremony, Torres said the goal is to have a “more prudent” state and to regain the trust of its citizens. The phrase sounds tidy enough. The reality is a political system trying to re-legitimize itself after years of collapse and churn. Peru’s new bicameral Congress faces the challenge of overcoming a governance crisis that has prevailed in the Andean nation and has seen eight presidents come and go in the last decade.
That crisis sits at the center of the story. The institutions keep changing shape, but the hierarchy stays intact. Congress has only just reinstated the bicameral system for the first time in more than three decades, and now it is dividing up leadership posts before the president-elect even enters office. The state is reorganizing itself from the top down, with the public expected to accept the result as normal governance.
Torres is not just the new Senate president. He is also Peru’s second vice president-elect, having been elected in the recent elections alongside Fujimori and first vice president Luis Galarreta. He is a lawyer and politician with a legislative career from 2016 to 2020, and he will preside over the Senate for one year. The titles stack up neatly. So does the power.
The People Below the Chamber
The article offers no grassroots response, no mutual aid network, no direct action from below. What it does show is a political class sorting out its own leadership while ordinary people remain outside the room. The Senate vote, the vice presidencies, the legislative session, the inauguration — all of it happens inside the apparatus, where the rules are written by those already inside the structure.
Peru’s Congress will officially begin its annual legislative session on Monday, the same day the lower house is expected to choose its leadership. The timing matters. The incoming administration is moving fast to lock in its institutional footing before Fujimori’s inauguration on July 28. In a country where eight presidents have come and gone in the last decade, the state’s answer is more state: more chambers, more offices, more ceremony, and more people claiming they can restore trust from above.
The numbers tell the story plainly. Thirty votes. Sixty senators. One year in the chair. Two days before inauguration. A bicameral Congress restored after more than three decades. Eight presidents in ten years. Those figures don’t describe stability. They describe a system that keeps failing ordinary people while the political class rearranges the furniture and calls it governance.