17/09/2017 | Latin America - Can Peru’s Kuczynski Overcome a Hostile Congress and Recapture Public Support?
David Dudenhoefer
LIMA, Peru—After little more than a year in office, Peru’s president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, faces an uphill battle to realize his agenda of ramping up economic growth in order to reduce poverty and follow through on other campaign promises. Can PPK, as he is known in Peru, deliver?.
Kuczynski has faced some unexpected
challenges over the past year. His administration was forced to funnel
approximately $6.2 billion of federal funds into reconstruction of areas devastated by El Nino-linked floods in March, which
Kuczynski says reduced economic growth this year by 2 percent. The
administration is also struggling to restart major public works projects that
it halted following revelations that the company executing them, Brazilian
construction conglomerate Odebrecht, bribed public officials for contracts. However, beyond his
own limited political skills and diminishing public support, the greatest
obstacles hindering Kuczynski’s presidency may be the opposition-led Congress.
Despite having won last year’s election by the slimmest of margins, Kuczynski
initially enjoyed the support of an ample majority of Peruvians. The
78-year-old president is dynamic and intelligent, a former World Bank
economist, mining executive and investment banker who made millions in the
private sector before running for office. He assembled a Cabinet of technocrats
with comparable corporate experience, arguing that an effective government
needs good managers. But their collective business acumen and experience have
been of little use in helping the administration navigate Peru’s treacherous
political waters, or address the concerns of many of its citizens.
Kuczynski has faced all kinds of social unrest during the past 13 months,
ranging from communities blocking roads to demand compensation for the negative
impacts of mines or oil fields to strikes by doctors, nurses and teachers. The
teachers’ strike, which dragged on for almost two months before union leaders
suspended it, has caused his administration the most damage. Congress
summoned Education Minister Marilu Martens to a hearing last Friday, during
which she had to answer dozens of questions about her handling of the strike,
and she could face legislative censure.
Martens was the vice minister of education until last December, when Congress
forced the previous minister, Jaime Saavedra, to resign due to irregularities
in the ministry’s purchase of computers. Saavedra might have been able to
resolve the strike more quickly, since he was familiar with the union leaders,
having served as education minister in the previous government.
Saavedra was one of several ministers who were forced to resign during
Kuczynski’s first year in office, weakening his administration. In June,
Congress forced out Finance Minister Alfredo Thorne, an
Oxford-educated economist who held a senior position at JP Morgan Chase prior
to joining the government, following accusations by Peru’s comptroller that
Thorne had pressured him to approve a contract. Congress subsequently fired the
comptroller due to various corruption allegations against him.
According to Patricia Zarate, a researcher at the Institute for Peruvian Studies,
Saavedra and Thorne were casualties of a political war that the opposition is
waging against Kuczynski, whose party, Peruvians for Change, holds just 18 of
the 130 seats in Congress. This unusual situation is a result of Kuczynski’s
lackluster presidential campaign and Peru’s electoral system, in which the
entire Congress is elected in a first round of voting, when many Peruvians cast
all their votes for one party based on the presidential candidate they prefer.
If no presidential candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, which
rarely happens, the two candidates with the most votes face off in a second
round. So presidents often come into office with minority representation in
Congress, as Kuczynski did.
Despite getting just 21 percent of the vote in the first round, Kuczynski
managed to win the presidency with 50.12 percent. This was largely thanks
to a last-minute surge of opposition to his rival, Keiko
Fujimori, the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, who has been in
prison in Lima since 2007, convicted of corruption and crimes against humanity
during his time as president from 1990 to 2000.
Though she lost the election, Keiko
Fujimori remains a formidable player in Peru. She ran a vigorous campaign,
remaking the political movement her father created by recruiting local leaders
as congressional candidates for her Popular Force party. Those candidates won
72 out of 130 seats, which means Fujimori’s party virtually controls Congress.
As she seeks to expand her party’s influence in regional elections next year,
and prepares for a probable third run at the presidency in 2021, Fujimori could
make it harder and harder for Kuczynski to govern.
Recent administrations have been able to establish alliances with other parties
that created relative majorities in Congress, Zarate explains, allowing them to
pass legislation. But Popular Force’s ample majority precludes that option for
Kuczynski. Zarate notes that Peruvian presidents in the 20th century who were
unable to cobble together relative majorities ended up being deposed by
military coups. Though Zarate believes it is almost impossible that the
military would remove Kuczynski from office, she noted that he is nonetheless
in a precarious position.
“I believe that we are going to have a situation of permanent political
instability,” she says.
Kuczynski might find it easier to get Fujimori’s party to support his
initiatives if he had stronger public support, but his approval numbers have
been steadily declining from a peak of around 60 percent shortly after his
inauguration. The polling firm GfK recently released a survey that showed only
19 percent of voters approving of Kuczynski’s performance, though the
president told RPP radio that he doubted the poll’s accuracy. A
subsequent poll by Datum released last week found Kuczynski’s approval rating
to be 22 percent.
As dismal as those numbers may seem, past Peruvian presidents have survived
lower public approval, and other Latin American leaders currently enjoy even
less support. A recent poll found that only 5 percent of Brazilians approve of
their corruption-plagued president, Michel Temer.
The good news for Kuczynski is that Peru’s economy is picking up. Moody’s
Investors Services predicts it will expand 2.7 percent this year, and a
combination of growing export revenues and several large mines in development
point to even greater economic growth in 2018. Kuczynski recently said that he
would increase the government’s education budget by 5 percent and the budget
for the national health system by 16 percent in 2018. The Interior Ministry has
also made progress on fighting organized crime, arresting not just the hundreds
of leaders of gangs that demanded protection money from businesses, but the
police officers who cooperated with them.
The question is whether Kuczynski can capitalize on such progress to improve
his standing with a skeptical public. Though he has strong support among
business leaders, Kuczynski has had a hard time connecting with the majority of
Peruvians and overcoming their suspicions of both the government and big
business. This often results in violent opposition to mines and other
extractive industries that have traditionally produced a large share of
government revenue. The run-up to regional and municipal elections in October
2018 is likely to exacerbate such protests in rural areas, as local leaders try
to position themselves as candidates, which could create more problems for the
administration.
Kuczynski has proposed improving the quality and coverage of public services in
rural Peru, which he says will increase support for extractive industries and
other major investments. This could boost incomes and government revenue,
thereby enabling further spending on public services. However, to achieve such
noble goals, the president will have to do a better job of playing politics and
convince more Peruvians that he is working for their best interests.
**David Dudenhoefer is a freelance journalist and communications consultant
based in Lima, Peru, from where he covers several South American countries.
World Politics Review (Argentina)
Otras Notas del Autor
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