Martín Vizcarra faces the debate on his dismissal in Congress

The Peruvian president, Martín Vizcarra, went to Parliament on Friday morning to face the debate on his dismissal.

The measure, forced by six of the nine groups in Congress a week ago due to the alleged "permanent moral incapacity" of the president, who was accused of irregular award of contracts, has an uncertain path and depends on the decision taken by the two majority forces , which are usually pronounced at the last minute.

Vizcarra apologized for the audios of conversations that have generated the political crisis that the South American country is going through.

And although some political leaders who days ago were in favor of the so-called “presidential vacancy” have changed their position, there is no guarantee that they will maintain it.

"If there is a terrifying news like the ones that have been coming out, we could change, the scene changes," congressman Omar Chehade, from the Alliance for Progress, told a radio before the start of the session.

Alianza por el Progreso is the political party that contributed the most votes (21) for Congress to approve the debate to remove the Peruvian head of state, in which his opponents need 87 votes.

The leader of that party, former presidential candidate César Acuña, released a statement on Saturday in which he considered "unnecessary and impertinent to force a presidential vacancy."

His brother, congressman Humberto Acuña, was sentenced in early September to disqualification from holding public office because he offered a bribe to a policeman linked to a criminal network, but he is still in office.

The same opinion against the dismissal was expressed by the leader of Fuerza Popular, the former presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, from her house arrest.

The policy is being investigated for money laundering due to having received illegal funds from the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht for its electoral campaign in 2011 and 2016. These opinions weighed on the decision that the Constitutional Court adopted on Thursday, to which the Government went to request a measure to suspend the debate on the impeachment.

The Court rejected the request.

"We have warned from the statements of the spokespersons and those who have partisan representation that they are not prolix to support the vacancy," the president of the Constitutional Court, Marianella Ledesma, commented this morning to Radioprogramas station.

Vizcarra has been put on the ropes after Congressman Edgar Alarcón, in coordination with the president of Congress, Manuel Merino, of the Popular Action party, released three audios recorded by the president's personal secretary on September 10.

In one of them, the president, his assistant and the secretary general of the presidency agree on the version that they should give to the Prosecutor's Office and the Parliamentary Audit Commission about the visits to the Government Palace of Richard Cisneros, a singer who He won state contracts for almost $ 50,000 during the administrations of former President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and the current president.

Alarcón, who chairs the Audit Commission, in turn faces two constitutional charges that Parliament has not yet debated.

The prosecutor of the Nation, Zoraida Ávalos, denounces him for corruption and illicit enrichment, crimes he committed when he was comptroller of the Republic, a position from which he was dismissed by Congress in 2017. On Friday the 11th, in addition to Alianza por el Progreso, they voted en bloc in favor of debating the dismissal of Unión por el Perú and Podemos Perú, groups whose leaders have problems with the law: one is in prison for the murder of four policemen and the other is being investigated for money laundering in the

.

The majority party, Popular Action, had 16 votes in favor, four against and three abstentions.

Three congressmen from Fuerza Popular and one We Are Peru supported the motion;

the Popular Agricultural Front of Peru (Frepap) -identified with the poorest- abstained and three of the leftist Frente Amplio spoke against it and four abstained.

The eight congressmen from the center-right Purple Party spoke out against it.

During the impeachment debate session, President Vizcarra's lawyer, Roberto Pereira, highlighted the vices that Congress incurred in broadcasting the so-called “scandal audios”.

“You cannot request a vacancy on an embryonic, presumptive, doubtful basis.

It is an illegal test because the formal channels have not been followed [in the parliamentary investigation of the hiring of the singer Cisneros] and the veracity of the audios has not been validated, "he said.

In his speech, Vizcarra affirmed that “the only thing that has been proven so far is the clandestine recording,” and asked Congress to let the Public Ministry investigate what corresponds.

In another of the broadcast audios, the head of state comments with his personal secretary that it was a problem that her relatives had benefited from contracts when he was the regional governor of Moquegua, in the southeast, and that some relatives of the secretary general of the Presidency - who resigned on Saturday - would have achieved public office.

Unstable stage

The sociologist Maritza Paredes pointed out in conversation with EL PAÍS that Peru is taking its toll on the fact of not having political parties, "but groups that do not respond programmatically to any sector."

“You cannot know where their votes will go because there is no political logic that we can understand, but rather they change according to the interests of the group and its members.

This has become more acute and is becoming much more visible in a context such as today: that is why we have this discussion between the Executive and Congress, because there is no capacity to form a stable government.

[The Executive] does not have the capacity to find formal and stable support in Congress, ”he explained.

Vizcarra took office as president in March 2018 after Kuczynski resigned before waiting for a similar debate vote to remove him.

The small bank of the former investment banker was diluted by resignations in his political group.

Last September, the president closed the Congress and in the parliamentary elections there were no candidates related to the Government, therefore, the president does not have representation in the Parliament installed in March.

“This started - due to the electoral results - with the Kuczynski government.

What comes from now on is precisely an increasingly fragmented politics.

Whoever wins the majority for the Presidency [in the April elections] is not necessarily going to have a bench in Congress that gives stability to the Government.

Not having been able to consolidate more or less clear political parties, with a constituted policy, will keep us permanently unstable ”, Paredes explains.