On Sunday 11 April, the first round of the presidential elections in Peru produced a major surprise: the victory, against all the odds, of Pedro Castillo, the leader of the 2017 teachers' strike. In the second round, he will face the reactionary, right-wing candidate of Fuerza Popular, Keiko Fujimori, in a clear expression of enormous political polarisation in a country ravaged by the economic crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.