Mounted on a horse and wearing his inevitable straw hat, Pedro Castillo came to vote on April 11 at a school in Tacabamba, a rural town of just over 3,000 inhabitants. Until then, the left-wing union leader, who was running for the presidency of Peru for the first time, had the expectation of becoming the surprise of an election that, a priori, did not count him among the favorites. A few hours later, that wish was more than fulfilled: amid high electoral fragmentation and the discredit suffered by the traditional political leadership of Peru, Castillo ended up being the most voted candidate in the first round with 19.1% of the votes.
That result, which was not part of the political analyzes that emerged from the capital Lima, shook the scene in Peru. But the shock wave generated by the irruption of an anti-establishment leader spread even more when it was confirmed that the ultra-conservative Keiko Fujimori – she obtained 13.3% of the votes – was going to be Castillo’s rival in the second electoral round. With this result, two out of every three Peruvians, who did not elect either Castillo or Fujimori in the first electoral round, will have to choose in the ballot next Sunday between two candidates with extreme positions.
“Peru reached this point because of the responsibility of its political elites, who never knew how to agree and put the country’s interests first,” says José Incio Coronado, a political analyst at the University of Pittsburgh.
“Now, it will be necessary to choose between two leaders who, although they will use different mechanisms, present similar risks: with Keiko Fujimori it is more likely that a mechanism of co-option of the institutions will be implemented, similar to what happened with his father (Alberto Fujimori) in the 90s, while on Castillo’s side, the risk goes more through an attempt to bypass the institutions, supposedly upholding the popular will, which could imply the closure of Congress and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly that drafts a customized Constitution. “.
These positions far from the search for consensus do not seem to be the most appropriate to leave behind the stage of extremely high instability that Peru suffers. The collapse of the party model in the mid-1990s and its replacement by very weak structures built around people has been encouraging institutional breakdowns in a country that has, in practice, a semi-parliamentary system of government.
Only with 20% of the congressmen, a vacancy motion can be requested from the president; with 40%, that proposal can be accepted and with 66%, it can be approved. This legal framework, in a context of extreme fragmentation of parliamentary representation, opened the doors to a chronic battle between the Executive Branch and Congress. The most obvious result of that bid is that Peru has had four presidents in the last five years.
Who will take the hot iron of the presidency as of July 28 is still unknown. According to the consensus of the polls, Castillo maintains a light advantage, but the gap has been narrowing considerably in recent weeks. In any case, if the union leader manages to resist Fujimori’s final climb, Peru’s course would take a sharp turn, at least economically.
Castillo promises to convene as soon as he assumes a constituent assembly that is responsible for drafting a new Constitution. The objective is to give the State a much more active role as a market regulator. Along these lines, it will seek to advance the nationalization of strategic sectors such as gas, oil and mining.
In addition, Castillo announced that he will review the current private pension system, the multiple free trade agreements signed by Peru in recent years and the contracts with transnational companies so that 70% of the profits remain in the country.
If implemented, they would be measures that would imply a radical change with respect to the course traveled by Peru in the last 20 years. During that period, thanks to prudent fiscal and monetary management, the country managed to leave behind the hyperinflation of the late 1980s to enjoy sustained economic stability.
That, added to the tailwind caused by the record prices of copper and other minerals that Peru exports, drove an average GDP growth of 5.2% in the last 15 years. Within this framework, poverty levels fell from 58.7% of the population in 2004 to 20.2% in 2019, according to World Bank data.
However, even with this economic expansion, historical deficits that Peru has dragged on for decades, such as high rates of rural poverty and high labor informality, could not be reversed. Worse still, the outbreak of the pandemic exacerbated those problems.
With a GDP contraction of 11.1%, in 2020 the levels of monetary poverty returned to the records that the country had ten years ago. In addition, 2.2 million people joined the unemployed legion and labor informality reaches more than 75% of workers, a historical record.
“The pandemic has hit citizens very unequally: the poorest sectors and those with informal jobs have suffered relatively much more than others, and that opened the way for old differences that were latent to be politicized,” says Paula Muñoz Chirinos, political analyst at the Universidad del Pacífico, in Lima.
“Castillo managed to mobilize that sector that is largely made up of people who had come out of monetary poverty due to the economic growth of the last decades, but who fell again before this crisis and now demand a change.”
With a disruptive speech, Castillo, who gained notoriety by leading a teachers’ strike that lasted 75 days in 2017, became the face of Peruvians who continue to be forgotten and poor despite macroeconomic growth in recent years. . On the other hand, Keiko Fujimori intends to establish itself as the guarantee of continuity, in broad strokes, of the current economic model, while seeking to focus on the risks that a Castillo victory would imply for economic stability.
“In the economic proposals there are profound differences between the candidates, but neither is Fujimorism the purest representative of neoliberal ideas,” says Muñoz Chirinos. “In the past, the government of Alberto Fujimori attempted neoliberalism with many components of populist policies , and that can go back to Keiko. “
Among his multiple campaign promises to different sectors of the population, Fujimori proposes, for example, granting the so-called “Oxygen Bonus”, a subsidy of 10,000 soles (about 2,600 dollars) to all families who have suffered deaths from coronavirus.
More similar than they appear
The differences that separate the two candidates in economic matters become more diffuse when comparing their other proposals. At the institutional level, Castillo assures that he will promote the election of new representatives elected by the people to replace the current composition of the Constitutional Court.
This intention of appealing to direct democracy has fueled suspicions that Castillo will seek to travel a path similar to that of Chavismo. Ambiguous when it comes to defining whether or not there is democracy in Venezuela, the leftist candidate has been deploying in recent weeks an obvious differentiation strategy with Chavismo. For example, he publicly asked the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, to take “his compatriots who have come to commit crimes to my land.”
Although Keiko Fujimori tries to strike on Castillo’s weak flank, the right-wing candidate does not have too many credentials to display in respect for the institutions. His role in Congress was key in the destabilization of elected presidents in recent years and, going forward, everything indicates that if he became president, he would also seek to advance the Judiciary.
“Chavismo implies the extreme concentration of power in the Executive and both candidates represent that danger,” says Incio Coronado. “Keiko Fujimori has, for example, all the incentives to intervene the Judicial Power due to the complaints that weigh on her and her relatives.” The candidate carries a request from the prosecution for 30 years in prison for alleged money laundering.
On the social level, the differences seem to narrow even more. Both candidates are against the legalization of abortion, equal marriage and the inclusion of a gender approach in school education. “In the absence of a progressive option, we have seen the use of social and moral issues from a conservative side by both,” says Muñoz Chirinos.
Since the turn of the century, Peru has elected five presidents by popular vote. All of them have been convicted or face legal proceedings. Peruvians will go to the polls next Sunday with the expectation of reversing that history. However, in the midst of a harsh social and health crisis, an endless struggle between the powers of the State and a society disbelieving in its political leadership, the new government will have to face challenges that could exceed it.
“It will be very difficult to achieve stability in the coming years: it is most likely that with Keiko Fujimori there will be greater social instability and with Castillo, more political instability because Congress will be against it,” says Incio Coronado. is that the conservative agenda will occupy more and more space in Peru. “
