(JANINE COSTA / AFP via Getty Images)
Editor's note:
Javier González-Olaechea Franco is Peruvian, an expert in government graduated from the École Nationale d'Administration de France, doctor in Political Science, with 18 years of public, private and teaching experience, and 20 years as a senior official of the United Nations. Researcher, lecturer and columnist for the newspaper El Comercio, from Peru. The comments expressed in this column belong exclusively to the author. See more at cnne.com/opinion
(CNN Spanish) -
Putting on the reader's glasses, it is legitimate for you to ask me why the balance that I offer is singular.
I understand it this way and I will try to explain it.
Since 2016, the presidency of Peru has been succeeded by Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Martín Vizcarra, Manuel Merino, Francisco Sagasti and Pedro Castillo;
four rulers who, according to the Constitution, assumed their functions for a single presidential term.
No less than three congresses were also elected.
Thus we find ourselves living in a low-density democracy.
Much can be used to decipher this voracious political and social instability, but I quickly find four linked reasons: the enormous public and private corruption, the lack of a State that ensures acceptable social security, the divorce between the population and the political class and the consequent distrust in the institutions of the State; singling out the widespread discredit of politics, Congress, judicial bodies and the enormous bureaucratic burden that almost everything paralyzes or demotivates.
We started the year in a campaign to elect a president, two vice presidents and 130 congressmen with a score of presidential candidates who, as I see it, mostly offered populist feasts ignoring the principles of primacy of reality and the material incapacity of the State, and in the framework of the vertiginous transition from an era of change to a change of era, the disruptive era, understanding by disruption the abrupt, vertiginous and determining change of a set of paradigms and rules that support one or more systems.
The head of the Peru Libre party, prevented from running after being sentenced for corruption, invited Castillo, a rural elementary school teacher with a union license, to tempt the presidency.
Obtaining the largest vote, with 19%, he faced Keiko Fujimori in the second round and proposed to eradicate what he understands as colonial vestiges and replace the Fujimori constitution with one made up of representatives of unions, popular associations and citizens, the latter being elected.
In short, a corporatist project ad hoc to the ideology of the group it represents, also a singularity in any democracy worthy of its name.
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Castillo assumed power on July 28 with half the country demanding electoral transparency and justice.
By the way, the winners argued that the ideologically radical option had won and that the anti-Fujimori sentiment did not prevail.
Your inauguration speech can be divided into two parts.
In the first, he despised all of our Spanish heritage, dividing Peruvians into good and bad, according to colonizing or Andean race, and mainly between the capital and the provincials.
In the second he was extremely generous in proposing objectives, but extremely greedy when explaining how to achieve them and with what money to finance them.
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Having to choose ministers, he appointed officials with pending accounts with the justice, inexperienced for the assigned functions or partners of terrorism. It did not go well, because in less than two months several ministers fell and he was forced to remove the head of the ministerial cabinet without having launched any policy against national emergencies: employment, health, economic recovery, crime, education and water, mainly. all inherited ills, by the way, and also common neighborhood challenges.
From the beginning and without pause, alleged clandestine and illegal presidential meetings were denounced and acts of alleged corruption of the president are now being investigated.
Mirtha Vásquez, chief of staff, has said that President Castillo will support the investigations.
The unease is also growing due to the constant rise in prices, the devaluation of the Peruvian sun, the economic shortage, the growing violence, the presidential refusal to grant interviews and the government inaction that mining companies have denounced in the face of the attacks.
The first presidential vacancy attempt failed, but the state attorney general has already denounced him for alleged crimes.
President Castillo still does not understand that he cannot govern with the small parliamentary representation that he has and that he must rescue the country by forming a Government with public alliances that grant him a parliamentary majority around a plan of urgent reforms agreed upon and a legislative agenda that will sustain it technically. .
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We must improve the economic and social indices that had advanced until the pandemic arrived, underlining that we continue to confuse economic growth with development in a country whose national averages are sinking in statistical mud.
Some parties in Congress must also be consistent as they harshly criticize the Government, but support it when voting.
Thus, our always alluded to governance will not be able to strengthen, and with the coming year, uncertainty and mistrust could continue.
Finally, some parties could continue to pursue the presidential vacancy as a last resort unfortunately, even though it has always been said that Peru is bigger than its problems and I firmly believe it.