Peru President Boosted in Battle With Congress as VP Quits
Vice President’s Resignation Eases Political Standoff in Peru
(Bloomberg) -- Peru’s Vice President Mercedes Araoz resigned one day after being sworn in by lawmakers as the country’s interim president, strengthening President Martin Vizcarra’s hand against a Congress that’s resisting its dissolution.
Araoz said she was unable to exercise the position of interim president after the Organization of American States called for Peru’s Constitutional Court to determine the legality of the dissolution, according to a letter she posted on her Twitter account late Tuesday.
Vizcarra dissolved Peru’s opposition-controlled Congress on Monday and called a parliamentary election in a bid to end the political gridlock over his plans to stamp out corruption in the Andean country. Lawmakers said the move was unconstitutional and voted to suspend him and swear in Araoz.
Now, Araoz’s decision to quit deals a blow to the opposition, and opens a path for the country’s highest court to resolve Peru’s worst political crisis in decades. It also strengthens Vizcarra’s high-stakes move to shut Congress. Though elected by popular vote, the legislature is currently held in low regard with an 87% disapproval rating.
“Reality is starting to sink in,” said Andres Calderon, a professor of politics at the Universidad del Pacifico in Lima. The opposition lacks the support of any Peruvian institution with any weight, the Armed Forces support the president and any street protests have been in favor of dissolution, he said. Crucially, the Organization of American States has said it’s up to the constitutional court to determine the legality of the president’s decision.
“It looks like the executive won and Congress lost and that creates a more predictable environment for the coming months,” Calderon said Wednesday.
Peru’s sol rose 0.1% to 3.388 per U.S. dollar at the close of trading in Lima.
One of the most stable economies in Latin America, Peru has been gripped by political turmoil since the general election of 2016 when Pedro Pablo Kuczynski scraped through a runoff vote for the presidency while his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, won a majority in Congress. A former vice president, Vizcarra took office roughly 18 months ago when Kuczynski resigned on the eve of an impeachment vote. He repeatedly clashed with lawmakers over plans to clean up public life.
Read More: Peru Bondholders Keep Faith as Political Chaos Sweeps Nation
Araoz said she was quitting as vice president because there had been a rupture in the constitutional order. She said she hoped the move would allow Peru to hold a general election “for the good of the country.”
Speaking in an interview with Lima-based Canal N network Tuesday, Vizcarra’s cabinet chief, Vicente Zeballos, said a general election was out of the question since a parliamentary election had already been called for Jan. 26. He also ruled out the president resigning to make way for a general election.
Zeballos said the president, who hasn’t commented publicly on the situation since announcing Congress’s dissolution, would name a new cabinet within the next two days. That will include a new Finance Minister to replace Carlos Oliva, who’s among several ministers who decided to leave government. Zeballos pledged continuity in economic policy.
Vote of Confidence
While Latin American history is rife with examples of leaders clinging to power and closing legislatures -- including Peru in 1992 under Alberto Fujimori -- Vizcarra had been pushing for the exact opposite. As his proposals to fight corruption in the political and judiciary systems made no progress in Congress, he then suggested early presidential and parliamentary elections for 2020, saying he wanted to give the country a fresh start.
As lawmakers rejected that idea as well, Vizcarra made a bold move, holding a vote of confidence in his cabinet. Peru’s constitution entitles the president to dissolve the unicameral Congress if lawmakers vote against two cabinets. In September 2017, then cabinet chief Fernando Zavala lost a confidence vote.
But lawmakers rebuffed his request once more and instead proceeded with the election of justices to the country’s top court -- in a process that Vizcarra had denounced as lacking legitimacy and transparency.
The decision to elect the first of six new justices Monday was a de facto rejection of the cabinet’s confidence motion, Vizcarra said in a televised address, adding that he was using his constitutional right to dissolve Congress. He called the measure a “democratic solution” to Peru’s political gridlock.
Opposition parties have dragged their feet on government reforms designed to stamp out corruption. Championing the corruption fight buoyed Vizcarra’s popularity at a time when many political parties and their leaders are implicated in a continent-wide bribery scandal uncovered by the so-called Carwash probe.
In a Sept. 25 interview with Bloomberg News, Vizcarra said closing congress was an extreme scenario, and said the best option was for the opposition to back his proposal for an early general election next year, one in which he wouldn’t stand as a candidate. Lawmakers voted down the bill last week.
To contact the reporter on this story: John Quigley in Lima at jquigley8@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Juan Pablo Spinetto at jspinetto@bloomberg.net, ;Walter Brandimarte at wbrandimarte@bloomberg.net, Robert Jameson
©2019 Bloomberg L.P.