The election of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski is a departure from the country’s past, but, if he wants to unite the country, he has his work cut out for him. Photograph by Mariana Bazo / REUTERS

The economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski won Peru’s Presidential election this week, beating his rival, Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a disgraced and imprisoned former President, by the thinnest of margins—a mere thirty-nine thousand votes out of nearly eighteen million cast. In every sense, Kuczynski is a member of his country’s social, political, and economic élite. Seventy-seven years old, he was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, and at Princeton; he has, at various points in his career, worked at senior levels of the World Bank, been an investment banker on Wall Street and a mine manager in Guinea, and has served as Peru’s Prime Minister, minister of economy and finance, and minister of energy and mines. He is also a onetime student of the Royal College of Music, an accomplished flautist and pianist, and the owner of a white grand piano that once belonged to Noël Coward.

Kuczynski, or P.P.K., as he is popularly known, for the initials of his name, is a first-generation Peruvian. He is the son of a German-Jewish doctor, Maxime Hans Kuczynski, a renowned tropical-disease specialist who left Hitler’s Germany for Peru in 1936. Among other legacies, the elder Kuczynski helped found the leprosarium of San Pablo, in the Peruvian Amazon, where the young Argentine medical student Ernesto Guevara, soon to become Che, volunteered for a time in the early nineteen-fifties. Kuczynski’s French-Swiss mother, Madeleine Godard, was a teacher of literature and music. Kuczynski’s full name, in fact, is Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard—Jean Luc Godard, the film director, is his first cousin. His brother Miguel was the head tutor at Pembroke College, Cambridge; an uncle was a Nobel Laureate for Medicine. And so on. His longtime friend, the former journalist Christopher Roper, told me, “It is impossible to think of a Latin-American head of state over the past hundred years with the intellectual distinction, independence of mind, and cultural breadth of P.P.K."

The ties that bind Kuczynski to the wider world are not only European. His first wife was an American named Jane Casey, the daughter of Joseph Casey, a congressman from Massachusetts. His second wife, Nancy Lange, also an American, is a first cousin of the actress Jessica Lange. One of Kuczynski’s daughters, Alex Kuczynski, is a former journalist for the New York Observer and the Times, and the author the book “Beauty Junkies: Inside our $15 Billion Obsession with Plastic Surgery.” Kuczynski himself had U.S. citizenship, which he renounced only last November, in order to run for Peru’s Presidency.

P.P.K.’s electoral victory bears examination, first of all, because, as his friend Roper pointed out, someone of his worldly pedigree is rare in a region with a longstanding penchant for folksy populists and authoritarians: Hugo Chávez, Álvaro Uribe, Daniel Ortega, and Cristina Kirchner come to mind, along with a long slew of others going back in time. Nor does P.P.K. fit into the current Latin-American political trend, in which powerful leftist governments, such as those in Argentina and Brazil, have been swept aside by the right. Kuczynski is a center-right Keynesian, while Keiko Fujimori, like her father, is a dyed-in-the-wool right-wing populist. Intriguingly, Kuczynski’s victory is due, at least partly, to the last-minute support he received from the Peruvian left. This is something new for Latin America, which has always veered toward obstinate, spit-in-your-eye polarizations over rational political compromises. The idea of a bipartisan political movement is almost unheard of.

Just a few weeks ago, in the run-up to last Sunday’s second round of voting, the chances of a Kuczynski victory seemed bleak. Polls showed him trailing Fujimori by more than seven percentage points, the equivalent of a million votes. In April, during the first round of voting, he had done poorly, securing only half as many votes as Fujimori did. His newly formed party, Peruanos Por el Kambio—a play on his initials—had also done poorly, winning a mere eighteen seats in Congress, compared to the Fujimori party’s seventy-three. But other contenders did worse, and Kuczynski managed to stay in the race.

A week or so before the second round of voting, Kuczynski’s numbers got a boost. Verónika Mendoza, who had been the country’s leading left-wing candidate, told her followers to vote for P.P.K. to save the country from Fujimori. For many Peruvians, the prospect of a Keiko Fujimori Presidency was becoming intolerable. As that was happening, a news story broke suggesting that the Drug Enforcement Administration was investigating the secretary-general of Fujimori’s party, Fuerza Popular, for laundering drug money. The D.E.A. issued a statement saying only that Fujimori herself was not under investigation. The Party secretary, meanwhile, denied the charges, but quickly resigned his post. Other news stories suggesting corrupt dealings followed, and at their final debate P.P.K. suggested, in uncharacteristically strong language, that if Fujimori won the Presidency, Peru was at risk of becoming “a narcostate.” (In a historic twist, the eminent Peruvian journalist Gustavo Gorriti, who was once abducted by Fujimori’s father’s henchmen, actively helped tutor P.P.K. for his final debate with Fujimori. Gorriti has explained his decision to abandon journalistic impartiality as something he felt obligated to do for his country.)

Talk of a narcostate resonates deeply in Peru, which is currently the world’s largest producer of cocaine, and where high levels of criminality and insecurity are compounded by a notoriously corrupt judiciary and police force. Peru is also struggling with an economic slowdown, widespread income disparities, endemic poverty, and rising discontent, particularly among the country's sizeable indigenous population. Fujimori is the daughter of a former head of state who has been tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for crimes against humanity, as well as various corruption offenses. For all her efforts to distance herself from her father, she was uniquely vulnerable to appearances of impropriety. Indeed, while P.P.K. had campaigned on a slate of increased transparency in government, Keiko, as Fujimori is known, had called for law and order. Her greatest popularity is among poor Peruvians, who still recall how her father won the country’s civil war against the Maoist guerrilla group Sendero Luminoso, and how he also brought the country out of a chaotic period of hyperinflation and into an economic boom.

Fujimori’s successes, however, came at a great price for Peru’s fledgling democracy. Two years after winning the 1990 Presidential election (in which he bested the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa), Fujimori dissolved Congress, suspended the Constitution, and assumed extraordinary powers in what became known as an auto-coup, or the “Fujigolpe.” Thereafter, he became increasingly autocratic, as well as corrupt. Together with his spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos—who, like his old boss, is in prison today, facing many years for many crimes—Fujimori ran the country like a comic-book villain, secretly bribing politicians and judges, kidnapping journalists, and ordering death squads to kill his political opponents. In 2000, when Fujimori was running for a third term in office, videos showing Montesinos personally bribing politicians began to circulate. To forestall an arrest for his own complicity in the scandal, Fujimori fled to Japan and faxed home his resignation.(The bizarreness of the Fujimory story goes on and on. In 2005, he left Japan for Chile, in order to be closer to Peru. He was determined eventually to return home and to power, but he was finally extradited back to Peru, in 2007, where he has been in jail since.)