In Queropalca, a small Andean district in Peru's Huánuco region, a cargo-transport businessman has taken an unlikely lead in the country's Oct. 4 municipal elections — running under the name Hitler Mussolini Simeón Flores.
According to Peru's National Office of Electoral Processes, as reported by El Imparcial, Simeón Flores won 229 votes, or 34.5% of ballots cast, against 204 for runner-up Gaspar Osorio of the Renovación Popular party. The margin was 25 votes in a district small enough that the result is still awaiting formal proclamation.
Simeón Flores ran for Ahora Nación, a party most outlets describe as left-leaning, though Agence France-Presse reported he was registered with the right-wing Fuerza Popular party as recently as 2025. If the result holds, he takes office as mayor on Jan. 1, 2027. NTN24 and other regional outlets picked up the result within days, each taking care to note that the coincidence of a name combining two 20th-century dictators carries no ideological weight in Peru.
Not the first Hitler on a Peruvian ballot
Names borrowed from world history, without any political intent, are a recognized quirk of rural Andean naming traditions. AFP noted that Peru's Congress seated a lawmaker named Hitler Saavedra Casternoque in 2021, and in 2018, Hitler Alba Sánchez was elected mayor of Yúngar, in the Áncash region, on a campaign that branded him "the good Hitler." Officials and reporters covering this year's race were explicit that the overlap with Mussolini is simply a product of the same pattern, not a statement about the winner's politics.
The story has traveled well beyond Peru, surfacing in outlets from Argentina to Italy largely because of the pure strangeness of the name on an official ballot sheet, rather than any policy fight in Queropalca itself. Local reporting describes Simeón Flores simply as a transport operator with no prior national profile.
What happens next is procedural: ONPE must certify the final count before Simeón Flores is formally proclaimed mayor-elect, a routine step for Peru's thousands of small municipal races. Queropalca, with a population in the low thousands, will otherwise return to local obscurity — at least until enough people notice who is about to run it.