Little hope for Peru’s political dynasty
Inside a colonial-era mansion that has seen better days, leaders of Peru’s Fuerza Popular movement gathered for an urgent meeting yesterday, scrambling for ways to save their party’s once-dominant place in politics.
President Martin Vizcarra dissolved the congress early this week and called new elections after a dispute with lawmakers over anticorruption efforts, unilaterally eliminating Fuerza Popular’s hard-won majority in the legislature. Meanwhile, the party’s leader was already sitting behind bars at a women’s jail filled with drug traffickers and petty thieves while she is investigated for corruption allegations.
The dissolution of Congress has plunged Peru into its deepest constitutional crisis in nearly three decades, and some think it may be the start of a final, bleak chapter for the country’s most prominent political dynasty. When the legislature was last shut down in 1992, strongman Alberto Fujimori sat in the presidential palace calling the shots. Fast forward 27 years, and now it is the party led by his cherished eldest daughter that is being kicked out.
When Fuerza Popular’s leaders stepped outside their headquarters after their meeting, they encountered a cruel realty: Much of Peru doesn’t love them anymore, according to opinion polls and hostility expressed on the streets.
If new legislative elections are held next year, as Vizcarra plans, the party will almost certainly lose its majority in congress.
“Fujimorismo has been in a death spiral,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard University political scientist. “It’s going to get pummeled in the election that comes. This is a pretty dramatic decline.”
The political dynasty began in
1990 when Alberto Fujimori, the Lima-born son of Japanese immigrants, won the presidency promising to usher Peru into a new era of progress.
But after a decade in office, Fujimori faxed in his resignation after fleeing to Japan while facing imminent removal by an oppositioncontrolled congress. In 2005, he was captured in Chile and extradited to Lima, where he was eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison for human rights abuses, corruption and sanctioning death squads.
Keiko Fujimori carried her father’s torch, expanding the party’s base and sought to forge a gentler, kinder image of the movement. In 2011, Keiko Fujimori finished second in Peru’s presidential election. Five years later, she lost again in a razor-thin vote, coming within less than a half percentage point of defeating economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. And Fuerza Popular captured a majority in congress. It’s been downhill since then.
Late last year, Keiko Fujimori was ordered jailed as prosecutors investigate accusations she laundered money from the giant Brazilian construction company Odebrecht for her
2011 presidential campaign.
For Peruvians like Maria Quispe, who works at a restaurant in a poor neighbourhood now filled with Venezuelan migrants, the public’s relationship with Fujimorismo is irreparably broken. She voted for Alberto Fujimori in 1990, but said she cannot bring herself to vote for anyone now from the movement.
“They had a chance, but kept doing what was in their own selfinterest,” she said. “There’s no way at this point that everything can be forgotten.”