A campaign from Peru's Indigenous communities to prevent the return of Fujimorism to the corridors of government has failed narrowly in the final round the country's general elections.

The 51-year-old daughter of the late Alberto Fujimori has claimed Peru's presidency by just 49,641 votes — the third slimmest margin in the country's 204-year history since its independence from Spain — from the South American country's approximately 26 million eligible voters.

After three past failed presidential campaigns, years of dodging legal troubles while avoiding jail time and more than a decade as a polarising opposition figure, Keiko Fujimori is also provisionally the first female Peruvian leader of the republic.

But it is the legacy of her controversial father as President which she carries as a political burden.

Between 1996 and 2000 Mr Fujimori directed the state-run, racially systematic forced sterilisation of Indigenous peoples as a part of Peru's national reproductive health and family planning program which concerned Quechua and Aymara tribes the most to this day.

Amnesty International had called it one of the country's most serious human rights violations.

Home to 54 Indigenous tribes — including 47 traditional Amerindian languages officially recognised by the state — the multiethnic nation has been undergoing a recent political and social crisis.

Critics of Ms Fujimori view her as the heir to an authoritarian political movement which has weakened democratic institutions and whose own record as an opposition leader suggests she may further erode Peru's feeble democracy and the rule of law, a claim she dismisses.

"We have to understand that our country is fragmented and above all, build bridges of unity," Ms Fujimori told local reporters after the election.

Popular Force, the party she founded sometime after her father was imprisoned for human rights abuses, has used its strength in Peru's congress to oust four recent presidents while also shielding her political allies from any corruption investigations.

After losing the last 2021 election to leftist candidate, Pedro Castillo, widely described to be the Peru's first Indigenous peasant president who remains imprisoned after attempts to dissolve congress, Ms Fujimori spent weeks claiming widespread electoral fraud without evidence and trying to annul votes from the largely poor Indigenous communities of the Andean regions.

Ms Fujimori's fresh victory is expected to be formally proclaimed on Friday by the National Jury of Elections after the organisation resolves any outstanding legal challenges following the certification of the official result.

Before the vote count for the runoff concluded on Monday, rival presidential candidate Roberto Sanchez said he would refuse to concede against claims Ms Fujimori owed her victory to a conspiracy of tampering with votes from overseas ballots.

It comes after an unsettling number of Peruvians fled the country in a period which saw Peru have nine presidents in the last decade, ensuring a record-high 1,210,813 people were eligible to vote from outside of its borders.

The majority of the past eight presidents were prosecuted amid a series of corruption cases.

"Within Peru, she didn't win," Patricia Zárate, a renowned Peruvian political analyst, confirmed.

"That's going to be hard to accept for an important part of the population."

During campaigning Mr Sanchez told of being "raised in an Indigenous family with roots in Peru's south" among the largely Quechua population where he gained the strongest core of his support.

He earned overwhelming votes in many rural and other Indigenous regions whose voters blame Ms Fujimori and Peru's conservative political establishment for backing crackdowns on protests.

They included many from disenfranchised Indigenous tribes after Mr Castillo's impeachment, which also led to dozens of civilians being killed.

The 57-year-old Mr Sanchez has led the centre-left Together for Peru coalition which has stood with the far-left Marxist Free Peru party, both consistently advocating for greater recognition and rights of Indigenous communities.

When Ms Fujimori takes office on July 28, she will join a growing bloc of conservative Latin American presidents, reinforcing a rightward shift across the continent to disenfranchise Indigenous peoples which recently included class warfare against peasant protests in Bolivia.

In protest ahead of the runoff of the general election, Indigenous agricultural workers called a strike against Ms Fujimori's leadership.

The Peasant Confederation of Peru blocked the highways in the north of the country to the capital, Lima, after Indigenous peasants faced a crisis over a lack of food production for families.

The Indigenous demonstrators, including rice, banana, and sugarcane farmers, had demanded the Peruvian government declare a state of emergency in the agricultural sector.

The results of the earlier first-round election in the battle of 35 presidential candidates highlighted not only the fragmentation of Peru's political system, but also Ms Fujimori's strategy to split the leftist vote to fragment vast Indigenous interests whose peoples cover around 25 per cent of the nation's population.