Pedro Castillo’s term lasted less than 17 months. If Peruvians have glimpsed anything since he took office, it is that the country teacher Y syndicalist he was not going to finish his presidency due to a combination of factors, among them a lack of credibility, the absence of a party of his own and, above all, the stubborn decision of a right-leaning Congress to remove him forever for “moral incapacity”. His successor, Dina Boluarte, begins the interim mandate in a weak situation. Here are some keys to understanding the political crisis that the Andean country is going through.
Rough management from the start
Pedro Castillo was an accidental candidate for president for Peru Libre, a left formation of provinces. accessed the Pizarro Palace after winning in the second round and by a few thousand votes to the right-winger Keiko Fujimori. His victory anticipated a future defeat: he took office on July 28, 2021 without a parliamentary majority, without gaining an iota of confidence from the capital elite who never hid his contempt for his status as a man of the deep peru Y peasant origin. Initially, Castillo tried to run a more left-leaning program. But the successive internal scandals, with the resignation of four prime ministers and successive changes in different strategic areas of the State, turned him into a weak and errant leader to the point of rearming his Government with leaders of other ideological origins. He came to count on a ‘premier’, Anibal Torresthat claimed Nazism.
An original unpopularity
It fell to Pedro Castillo to manage crisis Y scandals that they did nothing more than erode its image From the beginning. His average popularity was 30%. Only Congress racked up more disrepute than the president, but he ultimately ended up losing the fight with a legislature that had tried three times to censor him. The last one was the charm. But the key to his fall was not only in the hemicycle. Castillo did not have his own party: left Peru Libre when it made a political pirouette towards the center and beyond. But, in addition, he always lacked a social base that would come out in defense of him in a country where 30% of Peruvians are poor and the informal economy involves almost 89% of the population. GDP growth, which this year would be 2.7%, does not reach the majority.
Congress was just one of the storm fronts in these months for Pedro Castillo. The court was investigating him for alleged influence peddling. Part of his family was involved in different causes. Two months ago, the Prosecutor’s Office accused the president of leading a criminal organization linked to tenders in the State. The complaint was based on statements by former officials of his government and also businessmen who linked the president to a plot dedicated to collect bribes. The men who pointed to Castle with the finger were strictly under trial for other acts of corruption and agreed to accuse their former boss in exchange for criminal benefits.
Peru now has in Boluarte the first female president in its history. No one in Lima dared to predict how long his interim government could last, taking into account that before Castillo they abandoned executive functions prematurely. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Martin Vizcarra and Manuel Merino. The first resigned before being censured for being corrupt. The replacement Vizcarra could not avoid that fate. The unpopular Merino could not hold power for more than a few hours in the midst of popular protests. Boularte knows that complex history of instability and that is why he asked the legislature “a political truce to install a Government of national unity”. In his first speech he said: “I am not going to ask that they not audit my Government or that the decisions that will have to be made are not scrutinized; what I request is a term, a valuable time to rescue our country from corruption “. The history of conspiracies does not play in his favor.