Latin America is on the move.

After massive strikes in Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia,

and Chile, the causes of the relative long-term political stability in Peru remained a
mystery.

Despite numerous, continuous political and economic conflicts, Peruvians did

not form anything resembling the anti-corruption movement that overthrew
former dictator Alberto Fujimori. However, because of internal fractions inside
the political class, on 9 November 2020, the Peruvian Congress removed
President Martín Vizcarra. His replacement, Manuel Merino, lasted less than
five days in power. His short internship was swept away by the effervescence
of mostly young people in the streets of Lima. With Francisco Sagasti recently
announced as the new president of Peru, governing until the April 2021
elections, Peru is at a crossroads between stabilisation of the current regime
and the need for a real change to the political status quo.

Since the results of its 2016 elections, Peru has experienced a severe
institutional crisis. A government divided between President Pedro Pablo
Kuczynski and the Congress, controlled by the opposition leader Keiko
Fujimori (former dictator Alberto Fujimori’s daughter), has generated a
continuous struggle between powers. That crisis escalated with a corruption
scandal that led to the resignation of Kuczynski and, later, with the closing of
Congress during the government of his successor, Martín Vizcarra. When
Vizcarra was just beginning to achieve some stability, the COVID-19
pandemic attacked, and Peru was one of the most affected countries in the
Americas and the world. The vacancy against Vizcarra, the resignation of
Merino, and the explosion of the streets seem to have unleashed a general
crisis of the regime. Is this crisis just a short-term exceptional situation? Or
are we facing something harder, like a “new normal” that Peruvian people will
have to get used to?

First, unlike the countries that joined the “Bolivarian wave” of South American
left-leaning governments during the 2000s, Peru made no changes to the
1993 Political Constitution inherited by Fujimori’s government. It instead saw
the need to keep some stability on the free-market rules established by its
Economic Chapter. This is something completely different to what happened
in many other Latin American countries that faced similar processes. In Peru,
the political transition was guided by a general consensus achieved among
political and economic elites, with an important presence of the historic (and
mostly unpopular) political parties defeated by Fujimori in 1990. This is a key
fact because these parties were equally committed to a particular scheme of
relations between the public and private sectors.
In addition to this, the “political pact” of the Peruvian transition also had
another not-so-obvious feature: it aimed to not produce any kind of irreversible
disruption that could generate a general crisis regime. Yet that is what exactly
happened. Vizcarra’s dismissal, promoted by congresspeople equally or more
inserted in the generalised scheme of corruption than he, unleashed a
scenario of popular revolt. Vizcarra was vacated from power under a weak
legal figure in constitutional terms: a “permanent moral incapacity” that
originally was related to having the mental or psychological conditions to
exercise power, and not for ethical reasons. It is necessary to point out that
the reasons for Vizcarra’s vacancy were quite weak. On one hand, they refer
to acts of corruption that supposedly occurred before his designation as
president, while, on the other, the Constitutional Court recently refrained from
clarifying the figure of “permanent moral incapacity” with the argument of
“not… caus[ing]… greater political tensions in the country.” Keeping the
notorious political and ideological distances between both, Vizcarra’s vacancy
looks to be more similar to the 2016 impeachment process against Dilma
Rousseff in Brazil.

The end of Vizcarra’s government closed the post-transition political pact and
opened a Pandora’s Box of turmoil and instability since nobody seemed to
have the legitimacy to form a transitional government without facing strong
opposition in the streets. In that sense, Manuel Merino’s brief interim was the
worst possible response of the regime. Reflecting his notorious improvisation,
it took him three days to form a cabinet of ministers, only to have most them
resign after two days. He could not even consolidate an operational set of
alliances when popular mobilisation had already expelled him from power.

The popular revolt against Merino, although effective, had several objectives,
some of them quite contradictory to each other. There were those who
demanded the reinstatement of Vizcarra, others demanding “all of them must
go” (without clarifying who exactly “all of them” are), and still others calling for
a Popular Assembly to write a new Constitution. This fragmentation of
people’s demands is a symptom of the overall political situation. Since
Fujimori’s fall, popular protest has become irregular and reactive, with very
concrete agendas and almost always without underlying deeper political
objectives. Removing Vizcarra by force just eight months before the upcoming
presidential elections was as a catalyst for multiple popular claims, and it was
that catalytic character that made the protests successful. After the fall of
Merino, the Congress tried to lengthen the election of its new board of
directors, from which the following interim president would be selected,
because of the need to place a person without corruption ties. Only nine of
the 130 congresspeople do not have open criminal proceedings, so the new
interim president had to come from that group.
The new president, Francisco Sagasti, is a social researcher with more
technocratic and academic experience than political experience. In general,
Sagasti represents a “modernising” trend within the right-wing political sector,
which brings him close to what Kuczynski wanted to represent in the 2016
election. Given that Sagasti was appointed to complete the elected popular
mandate for the 2016-2021 period, no major changes or reforms are expected
from his term. However, if Sagasti leans towards an excessively orthodox
economic policy and does not take stronger financial measures to protect the
Peruvian population from the effects of an upcoming “second wave” of
COVID-19, it is possible that popular discontent would force Peruvians to new
mass protests demanding greater social and economic inclusion. This
scenario could unleash a new crisis inside the Congress that could even
remove Sagasti before the presidential election, generating a greater
instability and unpredictability.

Sagasti’s new government has begun to show some failures in the short time
since taking office. Despite having been able to cope an agrarian strike that
involved massive road seizures in the north and south of the country, the new
government’s strategy to combat the pandemic is even less clear today than
during the former Vizcarra government. Sagasti is being highly criticised due
to his excessively “scholarly” communication style. The precarious stability of
the government can be explained more by the weakness of its opponents than
by some kind of internal strength, which is why now there is a kind of “truce”
between the Peruvian political class that prefers to polarise and the new
president, who will be elected instead of an outgoing one like Sagasti. In that
sense, with a deeply delegitimised political system and a pandemic whose
end is not on the horizon, we can say that instability will be part of the “new
normal” in Peru for a while.

Anthony Medina Rivas Plata (Peru) has a B.A. (Hons) in Political Science and
a M.A. in Public Policy. He is currently working as Director of the School of
Political Science at the Universidad Católica de Santa María (UCSM),
associated researcher at the Institute of Andean Political Studies (IEPA) and
Peru Representative for the International Association for Political Science
Students (IAPSS).