“Concerning developments” affecting Peru’s higher education system could get worse under the tenure of the newly elected president, Keiko Fujimori, Latin American specialists fear.

Fujimori, who is set to be sworn in on 28 July, won the country’s closely fought election earlier this month, beating left-wing candidate Roberto Sánchez by fewer than 50,000 votes.

Her victory follows a series of lurches to the right in the region, including the recent election of Colombia’s Abelardo de la Espriella.

Rafael Shimabukuro, a research associate in Latin American development at the University of Cambridge, told ����Vlog: “Even before Fujimori’s election, there were already several concerning developments around Peruvian higher education, which only threaten to get worse under the new government.

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“The Beca Generación del Bicentenario, the government’s flagship scholarship scheme, was suspended at the last minute earlier this year, which left many young Peruvians with confirmed places in top universities abroad without their best funding opportunity. So far, I have seen few signs that the new government will restore these scholarships, which were modest to begin with.”

Anna Cant, a Latin American historian at the London School of Economics, agreed that “universities should be very concerned”.

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“There are many similarities between Fujimori’s authoritarian populism and the strategy that president Donald Trump has deployed in the US,” she said. “In her presidential campaign, Keiko Fujimori vowed to eliminate from the education system what she described as ‘gender ideology’ – right-wing shorthand for policies that promote diversity and inclusion. In practice, this could mean the closure of universities or programmes that do not align sufficiently with Fujimori’s ideological vision for the country.”

Keiko Fujimori is the daughter of disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori, who led Peru between 1990 and 2000. He is remembered for his aggressive use of the military and extrajudicial killings, conducting a coup against the country’s Congress and judiciary, and a forced sterilisation programme primarily targeting indigenous populations.

The election of Keiko Fujimori, who had sought the presidency three times before she finally succeeded with a promise to crack down on organised crime, has given rise to anxiety around academic freedom and the health of Peruvian education.

Her agenda could also have implications for British institutions with interests in the country – as recently as October 2022, a British Council report was for “further collaboration”, while the likes of the University of Leeds have .

“Much of Peruvian academia is critical of the Fujimoris,” Shimabukuro said. “This has led to growing authoritarian discourses within the Fujimorismo movement, denouncing the supposed sympathy for left-wing terrorism among left-wing and left-liberal (and even right-liberal) academics.

“This supposed sympathy is not real, but that has not stopped large parts of the right from using it to justify an anti-communist purge in all but name.”

Peru has lower numbers of young people with a master’s or an equivalent degree than other member countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. According to , just 2 per cent of Peru’s 25- to 34-year-olds hold such a qualification, well below the average of 16 per cent.

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University dropout rates are high – 21 per cent of students in Peru quit their course after first year, versus an average of 13 per cent globally. The country spends less as a share of its gross domestic product on education – with 4.2 per cent of its total budget going to education from primary to tertiary level, lower than neighbour Chile, where it is 5.9 per cent.

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Paolo Drinot, professor of Latin American history at UCL, said it was worth considering “the extent to which Peru is part of this Maga-like anti-intellectualism that we’re seeing in other parts of Latin America”, referencing pro-Trump sentiment in the region from the likes of Argentinian president Javier Milei.

“Certainly in Argentina, there’s a lot of tension with universities there; there have been massive protests,” he said. “There’s been nothing like that in Peru because civil society is much weaker…civil society doesn’t coalesce as effectively as it does in Argentina. But who knows how this government will proceed.

“One potential area of conflict could be universities because students are probably the one group in Peruvian society that are most likely to mobilise if things start to get quite nasty. I think that’s something to keep an eye on: how relations between the new government and the student body…will develop.”

Drinot also suggested that the new president could ape her father’s policy of mass deregulation, which affected everything from transport to higher education and created a “proliferation of many private universities, of, in many cases, low quality”.

“I think that’s the fear – growing deregulation and this race to the bottom, which to some extent is working because there is a lot of demand for university education in Peru,” he continued. “There’s a growing middle class, there’s been a democratisation of access – but in many cases it’s being met by quite poor-quality providers.”

That concern was echoed by Luis Miguel Castilla, an economist and a former Peruvian minister and ambassador to the United States.

Fujimori will focus on “inputs and infrastructure” rather than “systemic reform”, he suggested. “In higher education, [her] emphasis falls on access such as state-guaranteed student loans, a major expansion of scholarships, regional university networks, and internationalisation of public universities, along with…[plans] to align technical training with labour demand.

“What the plan conspicuously omits is quality assurance governance.”

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georgia.luckhurst@timeshighereducation.com