By Carlos Monge*

Prime Minister Salvador del Solar and President Martin Vizcarra / canaln.pe / Creative Commons

One year in office, Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra has made significant strides toward strengthening neoliberal economic policies and opening the way for a liberal project in Peru – while maintaining 50 percent popular support.  Prime Minister César Villanueva took the hit for a fall in the polls last week, setting the stage for Vizcarra to name a new cabinet this week to give a push to his agenda.  The new Prime Minister – lawyer, actor, and film director Salvador del Solar – espouses a market economy with strong state regulations against corruption, tax evasion, and monopolies, while defending human, women’s, and LGTIBQ+ rights.

• His opponents have been weakened. Former President Alberto Fujimori is back in jail, his presidential pardon revoked.  His older daughter, Keiko, is in prison, while awaiting trial on corruption charges, and his younger son, Kenji, is under investigation for links to drug trafficking.  Fujimori family long-time confidant Jaime Yoshiyama returned from the United States directly to prison for violations of campaign finance laws.

None of this seemed remotely possible only a year ago when Vizcarra, a Vice President, returned to Peru from his posting as Ambassador to Canada and, on March 23, was sworn in as President, after President Kuczynski resigned amid serious corruption charges.  Indeed, Vizcarra appeared destined to be a weak president facing a strong and ruthless parliamentary opposition.  The question then was if he would last or, rather, when he would fall.  Vizcarra initially seemed to follow his predecessor’s appeasement policies, attempting to govern without the permanent obstruction of a Congress dominated by Keiko Fujimori’s Fuerza Popular and its close ally, APRA.  He even consulted with Keiko about potential cabinet members and important policy matters.  Keiko, on the other hand, remained convinced that she should have won the 2016 elections and sought to govern the country through her control of the Congress, even hoping to generate a political crisis leading to new national elections that she was sure she would win.

• Vizcarra soon grasped Keiko’s intentions and sided with citizens’ widespread indignation caused by the leak of audio recordings that confirmed enormous levels of corruption in the judiciary and its connections to political parties such as Keiko’s Fuerza Popular and APRA. Despite desperate efforts by these parties and their allies in both the judiciary and the General Attorney’s office to block ongoing investigations, both Keiko and Alán García, the APRA leader and former national president, were in serious trouble.  Vizcarra embraced the anti-corruption platform and confronted head-on the same leaders and parties he had initially tried to appease.
• Bypassing the Fuerza Popular and APRA’s domination in Congress, Vizcarra succeeded in organizing a referendum last December that approved a package of reforms he proposed to reduce corruption. (He even convinced citizens to vote NO on one of his four reform proposals – the return to a two-chamber parliament – after Fuerza Popular and APRA introduced a provision that would open the way for parliamentary re-election in 2021, which another reform prohibited.)  With an average of 80 percent of voters supporting his position on all four measures, Vizcarra scored a huge victory– clearing the way for him to move forthrightly on his political and economic agenda.

Early posturing for the 2021 elections shows that Vizcarra may have opened a previously nonexistent space for liberal politics in the country.  In fact, his new Prime Minister has presidential aspirations and Julio Guzmán and his Partido Morado have recently registered, and they are –as Vizcarra is – – a “liberal” or “sort of liberal” politician.  The traditional right, including Fuerza Popular, APRA, the CONFIEP business guild, and others, have strongly criticized the values and economic views of the new Prime Minister, but the days that the only face of the right was a mix of state capture by large economic groups and conservative values and policies – a mix Alán García and Keiko Fujimori represent so well– seem to be over.  The emergence of a liberal project also represents a challenge for the left, traditional champion of liberal values.  If those liberal values now find liberal champions, the left will have to remain true to them while – at the same time – displaying its total opposition to the continuity of neoliberal economic policies and pushing for a set of distinctly leftist policies in the social, environmental and cultural realms.

March 15, 2019

* Carlos Monge is Latin America Director at the Natural Resource Governance Institute in Lima.