Perú y sus problemas de gobernabilidad.

 

 

 

Governing Peru in the Time of Party Collapse.

By Christopher Sabatini, Wilda Escarfuller, on 22 Aug 2013.       

   

This is the first in a two-part series on Peruvian politics. Part I examines the evolution of Peruvian politics since the Fujimori era and the challenging conditions for governance. Part II will examine President Ollanta Humala’s government and discusses policy solutions to Peru’s political volatility and social upheaval.

Another Peruvian president faces evaporating public support, a fractious opposition and civil unrest in the interior. This time it’s President Ollanta Humala, a former military officer who in his second run for office in 2011 presented himself as a moderate, pro-business social democrat—a contrast to his first run in 2006, in which he was all populist fire and brimstone.

Sadly, though, despite his 2011 makeover as a moderate—though still an outsider—the same fate has befallen Humala as has met Peruvian presidents since the election of Alberto Fujimori in 1989. In the post-Fujimori political dystopia, the fickle nature of party alliances and popular support has weakened the executive’s capacity to initiate and implement consensus over major policies. Add to that the disparity between Peru’s torrid rates of economic growth and the country’s levels of social and economic exclusion, and you have a prescription for political volatility and polarization. The question is whether this time it will lead to broader political and social upheaval.

It is now only two years into Humala’s five-year term and things are already looking pretty grim. According to recent polls by the firm Ipsos Peru, Humala’s popular approval rating is currently at only 33 percent, a decline of 20 points since April. And the president is facing defections from his government, with more than 26 ministers or high-level officials having resigned since Humala was inaugurated. At the same time, Humala’s party in the unicameral national legislature, the Congreso Nacional del Peru (National Congress of Peru), is already showing signs of splintering.

In the background to this political fracturing is the persistent boil of social conflict. Last year, the government’s Human Rights Ombudsman’s office reported that there were at least 149 conflicts in Peru’s rural areas, reflecting a 548 percent increase since 2007, many of them in indigenous communities, over extractive industries.

News reports have focused on this as the dilemma of a progressive, pro-business president governing in a poor country. It’s not that simple.

Rather, Humala’s struggles stem from the difficulties of governing in a post-partisan country where politics has become a blood sport. Institutional checks and balances remain weakened, inviting overreach. And the capacity of the state to deliver social programs has not caught up with the riches floating around the economy from international investment and natural resource extraction—and the popular expectations that has come with them—and newfound consumerism.

This state of affairs is not entirely new. Since the end of the Fujimori era, Peruvian presidents have had to confront the hyper-volatility of Peruvian public opinion. President Alejandro Toledo—who replaced Fujimori after the Japanese-Peruvian executive unexpectedly faxed in his resignation from Japan after a series of corruption scandals—ended his constitutional mandate in 2000 with his popular approval in urban areas hovering at 8 percent.

Toledo’s ignominious final days were a surprise, coming as they did after 10 years of Fujimori’s autocratic, brutal and corrupt regime, and with Toledo’s term in office accompanied by the steady trickle of revelations of just how corrupt and amoral the Fujimori government had been. In contrast to the Fujimori era, economic growth averaged 6 percent during Toledo’s five years in government.

Toledo’s successor, Alan Garcia, fared no better. Though Garcia’s first term in power, from 1985 to 1990, ended in unmitigated disaster, 16 years later an older and chastened Garcia proved to be more temperate and a better steward of the country’s economy. During his second term, from 2006 to 2011, economic growth hummed along at an average of 7.2 percent per year, while in sharp contrast to his first turn at holding power, inflation remained in the single digits. In part because of these factors, and the economic groundwork set by his predecessor, poverty was reduced from 48 percent in 2006 to 27.8 percent in 2011, according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadistica e Informatica (National Statistics and Information Bureau).

And yet, despite these factors, Garcia finished his term at only 42 percent in popular support.

As Toledo and Garcia can attest, maintaining the support of the Peruvian public is not an easy tightrope to walk—especially when political parties are the interlocutors. Both presidents managed, though it took effort. The question this time is whether the Peruvian public’s demands and structures for expressing them have become too fractured, the debate too unconstructive and politics too fluid and poisonous. Moreover, in contrast to the last two embattled presidents, Humala’s troubles have started much earlier. Humala now risks becoming boxed in by his anti-system, progressive image and the expectations that image raised—though with little broad structural popular support in favor of his policies. Meanwhile, the government’s support in congress continues to dissipate.

Can Humala recover?

Christopher Sabatini is editor-in-chief of Americas Quarterly and senior director of policy at the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. Follow him on Twitter on @ChrisSabatini.

Wilda Escarfuller is editorial associate of Americas Quarterly and policy associate at Americas Society and Council of the Americas.