Dictatorship of Congress in Peru?

In 2026, Peru will hold elections between more than 30 presidential candidates and two thousand Senate candidates. Congress revived the bicameral system that had been in place since the beginning of the Republic in March of this year with a broad constitutional reform of the 1993 charter, inherited from the regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

Ironically, one of the reforms he did not consider was that if in the first round the two leading candidates did not obtain 55% of the votes, the election should be declared null. In 2001, the two candidates who reached the second round – Alejandro Toledo and Alan García – together obtained 62%. Twenty years later, Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori obtained barely 32%.

Since 2016, the third largest South American country after Brazil and Argentina and its fifth largest economy, has had six presidents –Kuzcynski, Vizcarra, Merino, Sagasti, Castillo and Boluarte–, eight attempts at vacancy (presidential impeachment), a controversial dissolution of Congress (January 2019) and a brief self-coup (three hours on December 7, 2022).

In the first two months of Dina Boluarte’s mandate, state repression claimed fifty lives in the regions of Puno and Ayacucho, which have the largest concentration of Aymara and Quechua populations. A few months ago, Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the Andean country to the status of a “hybrid regime.”

Authoritarian coalition

Since December 2022, when he succeeded Castillo – who once again showed “the incompatibility between radicalism and naivety,” as Ascanio Cavallo writes in Third–, Boluarte’s popularity has never exceeded 10%. Between December 2022 and January 2023, mass marches in the Andean South, where Castillo swept the 2021 elections, demanded an early election that never came.

According to Paula Távara, a political scientist at the PUCP in Lima, the president and Congress have established a “coalition authoritarianism”: an authoritarian regime without a dictator made up of dissimilar political and economic groups that share the goal of changing the laws necessary to defend their interests – many of them illegal – and to remain in power even beyond 2026.

In March alone, Congress, whose discredit is even greater than that of Boluarte, changed 50 articles of the constitution. Aware that it owes the presidency to chance and that Congress is not going to commit suicide emptying itBoluarte has ended up handing over his powers, which he used to capture – and co-opt – the Constitutional Court and the Ombudsman’s Office and replace the body in charge of appointing judges with another more docile to his wishes.

Among the leaders de facto of the authoritarian coalition – the Fujimoris, the mayor of Lima, Rafael López Aliaga, César Acuña and José Luna, magnates of the so-called universities bamba, and retired admirals and current congressmen Cueto and Montoya – there is also Waldemar Cerrón, the current leader of Peru Libre, who presented Castillo and Boluarte in 2021. His brother Vladimir, founder of the party and trained as a doctor in Cuba, is a fugitive from justice, which accuses him of various charges of corruption when he was governor of Junín.

The dilution of power

In it Journal of Democracy Peruvian political scientists Rodrigo Barrenechea and Alberto Vergara present their country as an extreme case of “democratic hollowing out” that does not generate the concentration of power as in Venezuela or Nicaragua, but its dilution and the amateurism of the political class.

Of the last 10 presidents, remember, six had never won an election for any office before. Castillo, for example, was just a trade unionist and rural teacher from Cajamarca who few knew about before 2021.

«The case of Peru does not illustrate the concentration of power as in Venezuela or Nicaragua, but its dilution and the amateurism of the political class.»

Under these conditions, say Vergara and Barrenechea, elections cease to be a democratic mechanism and become a kind of lottery, with parties becoming groups whose registration in the electoral registers allows them to present candidates and auction off candidacies among potential clients in need of parliamentary immunity and other political privileges.

Firm hand

The stakes of the coalition are getting higher and its scruples fewer. According to the Ombudsman, protesting was much more dangerous in 2023 than in any of the previous 22 years. Reports from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Amnesty International or the New York Times have not inhibited the repressive instincts of the government, which in December supported the change of the penal code to punish with prison sentences the “financing” of protests.

The background – former presidents in prison, under house arrest or who committed suicide, like Alan García – is not encouraging for Boluarte and his allies in Congress. Fujimori was convicted in 2007 for crimes – murder with premeditation, aggravated kidnapping and serious injuries – committed in 1991 and 1992.

While in Beijing on a state visit to be received by Xi Jinping, representatives of international human rights organisations and their Peruvian affiliates filed a complaint with the International Criminal Court in The Hague, charging Boluarte with 49 murders and 155 attempted murders between December 2022 and February 2023.

According to the complaint, 63% of the bullets fired by Galil and AKM rifles and Beretta and Sig Sauer pistols, which are standard equipment for the security forces, were aimed at the chest and 22% at the head. Thirty percent of the victims (15 people) were shot in the back at close range.

Boluarte gave courses and promotions to five of the police generals who were in command of units involved in the repression and appointed the then Minister of Defense, Alberto Otárola, as Prime Minister, who resigned months later due to an affair, not because of his responsibility in the repression.

Roots of the crisis

After losing the second round in 2016 by 40,000 votes against Kuczynski, Keiko promised that Fujimorism would govern “from Congress,” thus placing the sword of Damocles of a vacancy premature due to “permanent moral incapacity,” which only requires 87 of the 130 votes of Congress.

Despite his many concessions, the Fujimori faction continued to censure and force the resignation of several of Kuczynski’s key ministers, and in March 2018 forced his resignation. The political system did not recover.

The last president to complete his term was Ollanta Humala, in 2016. Since 1985, all presidents with the exception of the interim presidents Paniagua (2000-2001) and Sagasti (2020-2021) have been investigated for corruption cases.

The Prosecutor’s Office is investigating Boluarte for the case Rolexgate: jewelry and watches worth several hundred thousand dollars, the income from which cannot be justified, and which he displayed frivolously – and imprudently – at public events.

The melodrama had only just begun. Prosecutors and police broke down the door of her house to seize incriminating evidence. In front of the cameras, she accused them of acting in an “arbitrary and abusive” manner against her because she was a woman and that her “sin” had been wanting to represent Peru “in the best way possible.”

Depth charges

Santiago Pedraglio warns in the Agrarian Magazine that, as things stand, no matter how hard it tries, Congress will be unable to prevent the last-minute elevation of unknown or marginal candidates, even if it takes control of the electoral bodies (JNE and ONPE) to exclude potential rivals. Congress does not want to leave anything to chance.

Among other things, he has created a “Super Senate” with broad powers over the lower house. With the necessary votes, it will be able to dismiss all members of the Supreme Court, prosecutors, ministers and members of the Constitutional Court. Some of its members will be elected by single district, which benefits Lima in particular, which has 31% of Peru’s 34 million inhabitants.

Until 1992, the Parliament was composed of a Senate of 60 members and a lower house of 180 deputies. The 1993 charter reduced this number to 120, which meant that the fifth most populous country in the region fell to 14th place in terms of the number of congressmen, behind Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile and Uruguay, which have considerably fewer inhabitants. The same thing happened in Ecuador and Venezuela when the governments of Rafael Correa and Hugo Chávez promoted changing their parliamentary structure to make it unicameral.

The country of informality

Macroeconomic stability is the other side of the coin. So far this century, the country has had the lowest inflation rate in the region. The current rate is 3%. Only 34% of deposits, 23% of bank loans and 8% of mortgages are in dollars. Foreign exchange reserves total 74 billion dollars, 28% of GDP, the highest rate in LAC.

Its exports represent 26% of GDP, compared to 14% for Argentina. Between 1980 and 2022, Peru increased its GDP per capita by 74%, second only to Chile (206%) and Colombia (108%). Between 2007 and 2016, the economy grew by around 5.5% annually. Since then, however, it has only grown by 1.8%.

The biggest problem is the informality rate, at 71%. Standard & Poor’s has just downgraded the country’s credit rating to BBB-, the lowest since 2011. A further downgrade would make it lose its investment grade. According to a survey of 143 CEOs of large companies, 87% disapprove of the government.

Saviour table

Amid the institutional collapse, the prestige of the central bank (BCR) and its president, Julio Velarde, remain intact. In the 18 years of his administration, average inflation has been lower than the world average. In 2024, it will once again be the lowest in the region. But the autopilot is not sustainable. sine die. Now, the Senate will be able to replace the BCR board of directors.

Moody’s warns that the main problem is not macroeconomic (the fiscal deficit was 2.8% in 2023) but the government’s limited political capital. At a recent Peruvian business summit, Felipe Ortiz de Zevallos recalled that one of his professors at Stanford, Thomas Sowell, used to say that the first lesson of Economics is that there is never enough to satisfy everyone, but that the first lesson of Politics is to ignore the first lesson of Economics.

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