Peru's ninth president in a decade has spent her first two weeks making promises with real numbers attached and asking for a legal fast lane to deliver them. What she has not yet done, thirteen days into the job, is get that fast lane approved — or, in at least one region she visited before taking office, deliver on decrees she said would already be signed.
Keiko Fujimori, 51, was sworn in on July 28 after beating left-wing rival Roberto Sánchez by fewer than 50,000 votes in June's runoff. She is the ninth person to hold the office in ten years, a run in which only three predecessors actually won election outright; the rest arrived after a resignation or a removal by Congress, according to reporting from the ceremony itself.
Fujimori built her inaugural address around a pair of declared emergencies: the extortion and gang violence gripping Lima and other cities, and the seasonal flooding threat of El Niño. She framed both as problems the ordinary legislative calendar moves too slowly to solve, previewing a request to govern parts of her agenda by decree.
Troops move into crime zones — with a caveat
On security, the concrete commitment is this: in any area placed under a state of emergency, the armed forces will temporarily take the lead on security operations and control of public order, working "in close coordination with" the national police, according to the text of her address. That's a narrower claim than "military above police" — it's a joint command, not a formal hierarchy, and Fujimori did not specify which territories would qualify or when.
A more contested piece of the plan surfaced in a leaked draft of her powers request: putting the armed forces in charge of running prisons, tied to long-term plans for a megaprison modeled on El Salvador's CECOT, the facility built under President Nayib Bukele. Armed-forces oversight of penitentiaries was already part of Fuerza Popular's campaign platform; the mega-facility idea builds on it.
The paycheck and the pension check
The single hardest number to come out of the inaugural speech was economic: a 15% increase to the minimum monthly wage, from 1,130 to 1,300 soles — about $382 to $384 at the exchange rate in effect the week it was announced, not the lower figure some initial coverage used. The increase will arrive alongside a one-time bonus for micro and small businesses meant to soften the added labor cost, Fujimori said: "To improve workers' income, we will raise the minimum wage to 1,300 soles." Notably, the raise wasn't part of her campaign platform — she had previously argued any increase should rest on technical criteria rather than political timing.
On pensions, the announcement was more specific than a general "boost." Fujimori pledged to double the Pensión 65 subsidy for people in extreme poverty, from S/350 to S/700 every two months: "We will begin by doubling the amount of Pensión 65," she told Congress, framing it as the first step toward a universal pension for older Peruvians in poverty.
Piura is still waiting
Before her inauguration, Fujimori told provincial mayors in Piura — one of the regions most exposed to coastal flooding — that she would sign two supreme decrees on taking office: one funding machinery, fuel and operator wages for emergency riverbed-clearing work, the other unlocking roughly 40 million soles for unfinished water and road projects, according to mayors who met with her in the week before she took office. Neither decree had been issued as of early August, according to reporting from Piura quoting local mayors directly.
That gap matters more than it might elsewhere, because Peru's El Niño monitoring commission, ENFEN, isn't describing a future risk — it has kept the country under an active coastal El Niño alert for months, with its most recent forecast projecting strong intensity through October, a dip to moderate in November, and a return to strong-or-moderate conditions from December through March, persisting into the 2027 summer. Peru's rainy season begins in September.
The 120-day wish list — still unsent
The administration's biggest structural ask hasn't reached Congress yet. The plan is to request 120 days of delegated authority to legislate by decree across seven areas: citizen security; support for entrepreneurs and small businesses; employment and social protection; administrative simplification; productive development; tax, customs and trade rules; and a reorganization of the state itself — including power to merge, split or eliminate agencies such as the tax authority Sunat and the labor regulator Sunafil.
But the bill Fujimori's Cabinet was supposed to finalize on August 2 never got a vote that day — the session was postponed — and as of August 8 she was still telling reporters she expects the text to go to Congress "next week." A leaked early version included proposals to cut non-working holidays and scale back severance and bonus payments for lower earners; by July 31, both Fujimori and Labor Minister Juan Sheput had publicly disavowed those specific items. "No labor right will be cut," Fujimori said, while Sheput called debating an unfinished draft irresponsible.
Two chambers, two different vote counts
Once the bill is filed, it needs to clear both houses of Peru's newly restored bicameral Congress — itself a first in more than three decades. The math looks different depending on which chamber you're counting. In the 130-seat Chamber of Deputies, Fujimori's Fuerza Popular and its ally Renovación Popular hold 56 seats between them, short of the 66 needed, meaning the government needs roughly ten opposition votes to pass. In the 60-seat Senate, the same coalition holds 30 seats — just one vote short of the 31 needed for a majority. Opposition senator Jaime Delgado called the request "very exaggerated," warning in comments to Infobae that a delegation of powers "has to be narrow and specific."
Parliamentary specialists estimate a final decision could land between mid- and late September once the bill is actually filed — a Senate committee alone has up to 90 business days to rule on it — pushing any decree-making power well past the two-month mark of Fujimori's presidency.
Why it matters
Peru has cycled through nine presidents in ten years, and Fujimori's government is betting that a working coalition plus a broad decree mandate can produce something more durable than her predecessors managed. The gap so far is between what has been announced — a wage increase, a doubled pension, a military role in emergency zones — and what has actually been delivered on the ground, where two promised flood-prevention decrees in Piura remain unsigned and the marquee legislative request hasn't left the Cabinet's desk. Most of what the public knows about this presidency right now is still a plan, not yet a policy in force.
