Keiko Fujimori was sworn in as Peru's president on July 28 and delivered a 45-minute address that was, by the debased standards of the office, disciplined: seven objectives, hard numbers, no rambling. That discipline should not be mistaken for candour. What Fujimori chose to omit from her inaugural message says more about her government's real priorities than what she included.

The most conspicuous silence concerned human rights. Fujimori took office on the back of a right-wing party, Fuerza Popular, whose outgoing legislative bench spent its final weeks in Congress passing laws that shield police and soldiers from ordinary prosecution and that narrow the definition of crimes against humanity below the Rome Statute standard. Opposition lawmakers walked out of the chamber holding photographs of the roughly 50 people killed in the 2022-23 protest crackdowns before she had spoken a word. She did not mention them once. Nor did she address gender violence, sexual education, disability rights, or environmental conflict — a discourse so selectively curated it reads less like an oversight than a strategy.

The security pledge is the clearest case of a government reaching for a slogan rather than a solution. Fujimori announced that the armed forces would take "temporary" control of security operations during states of emergency, following a model already tried under Dina Boluarte, José Jerí and José María Balcázar since 2023, and one under which the average daily homicide count has risen with each successive administration, from 5.25 to 5.73 to 5.88. Handing internal-order duties to generals has not worked in Peru; appointing a retired army general, César Astudillo, as interior minister suggests Fujimori intends to repeat the experiment rather than question it. Extortion — the crime behind the ten deaths in the La Victoria arson attack she did cite — is a policing problem, not a military one, and her speech offered no reform of the "pro-crime" laws that prosecutors blame for the surge.

On the economy, the contradictions are just as sharp. Fujimori built her campaign on fiscal discipline and dismissed a minimum-wage rise proposed by her rival Roberto Sánchez as pandering for "easy applause". In office, she announced almost the same policy — raising the minimum wage to PEN1,300 — plus a doubling of the Pensión 65 stipend, alongside a chapter devoted to "fiscal sustainability". Business federations SNI and Confiep welcomed the growth agenda but were visibly wrong-footed by the wage hike, which their own incoming economy minister, Elmer Cuba, had said only a day earlier remained "under evaluation". Neither group has been told where the money is coming from, and infrastructure promises — Lima's Metro Lines 3 through 6, new systems for Trujillo, Piura and Arequipa — carry no financing detail at all, a familiar pattern for a country whose infrastructure announcements rarely survive contact with budget season.

Mining, Peru's most consequential ongoing economic story, went essentially unaddressed. The Peruvian Economic Institute estimates illegal gold exports alone topped $11.5bn in 2025, roughly matching legal exports in tonnage, while formal mining projects worth some $12bn sit paralysed by permitting delays and insecurity. Fujimori's silence on illegal mining, and on the Reinfo registry that enables it, is not a gap in the speech; Reinfo's beneficiaries overlap with constituencies Fuerza Popular cannot afford to alienate.

The foreign-policy signal was louder than anything in the speech itself. Fujimori's choice of chancellor, Carlos Espá — a broadcaster-turned-politician with no prior diplomatic career — spent fifteen years, from 2008 to 2023, running communications for the US embassy in Lima, and built part of his own presidential campaign on criticism of Chinese influence in the country. The appointment extends a realignment already visible in the F-16 procurement and in Washington's assertive courtship of the incoming government through Ambassador Bernie Navarro, both aimed at counterweighting China's deepening footprint, most visibly at the Chancay megaport now run by Cosco Shipping. Beijing remains Peru's largest trading partner and the principal buyer of the mineral wealth Fujimori's speech left almost untouched; tilting toward Washington on security and diplomacy while the economy stays dependent on Chinese capital and demand is not a contradiction she addressed on July 28, any more than she addressed the others.

The leftist opposition's theatre deserves equal scepticism. Walking out with photographs of the dead before the president had spoken made the point once; demanding, in the same breath, the release of Pedro Castillo — a president who attempted a coup and triggered a constitutional crisis — undermines the moral clarity of the gesture. Legitimate grievance and performative outrage are not the same thing, and Peru's fractured opposition has a habit of collapsing the distinction.

The deeper structural story, though, is institutional capture, not rhetoric. An opposition defector's spoiled vote handed the Senate presidency to Miguel Torres despite the coalition losing the lower chamber, giving Fujimori's bloc control of the body that, under Peru's new bicameral Congress, holds the real power. Combined with a cabinet stacked with centre-right technocrats and no representation from the left, indigenous movements or organised labour, the picture is of a government consolidating institutional control while its inaugural speech performs conciliation.