Pedro Castillo’s challenges: governing and transforming Peru, resisting the coup right

From Lima

To the rural teacher Pedro Castillo, who surprised everyone in 2021 by becoming president of Peru after defeating the right wing and the power groups behind Keiko Fujimori, opens up to him such a hectic and complicated new year how have your first five months of government, in which the ex-unionist has faced the war without pause from the right wing and the hegemonic media, and has been able to avoid an attempted parliamentary coup, threats that are renewed this year that begins.

With the coup right preparing a new attempt to remove him, Castillo also starts the year with problems on his home front: distanced from the party that brought him to power, with the ruling party parliamentary bench fractured between those who support the government and those who question it with a radical speech that accuses Castillo of having moderated, with the leadership of the ruling party Free Peru (PL) faced with other sectors of the left allied to the government, management errors, questioned appointments, allegations of corruption that dot it, silences and delayed reactions in times of crisis.

Vaccination and growth

Despite external attacks and internal weaknesses, the government has had achievements which has the challenge of consolidating this year. Has achieved a successful breakthrough in vaccination against covid 19. Last July when Castillo assumed the presidency, 15 percent had been vaccinated, now the 80 percent of those over 12 years of age and in January they will begin to immunize children from the age of five. The pandemic, with the threat of a new wave, it will continue to be a central challenge. The economic reactivation, which was the other great challenge at the beginning of his tenure, has resulted in a 13 percent GDP growth by 2021, the highest in the region. For this year, a growth of around four percent is estimated, which would be among the highest in the region. The challenge is to consolidate this reactivation and not to rebound after the 11 percent drop in GDP in 2021, as claimed by the right.

Despite these achievements, downplayed by its enemies and overshadowed by its own shortcomings, the government has not been able to project a clear course and so far the great changes offered and expected have not been seen. The image of the peasant who came to the presidency from the poorest and most marginalized sectors of the country, embodying a historical claim and hope, has begun to fade. The approval of Castillo’s discharge, who won the second round with 50.12 percent, has fallen and is between 28 and 36 percent, and his rejection level between 60 and 58 percent, according to the polls carried out. in December by the Institute of Peruvian Studies (IEP) and Ipsos. Halting that decline and regaining popular support is a key challenge for Castillo.

PageI12 He spoke with three analysts about the main challenges in 2022 for the beleaguered Castillo government.

“To confront the extreme right-wing coup and irrational and the bullying from the media that is awesome, Castillo’s main challenge is to govern and transform at the same time. The government must not only survive, it must initiate a process of change, and that implies having a cohesive and capable government team. The first thing Castillo must do is put order within his government and consolidate the left-wing alliance of the second round of the elections and apply the program of changes that that alliance proposed. So far it is ruling half with that program, there are sparks, such as the launch of the second agrarian reform (a program to support small agricultural producers), but you do not see a consolidated government with an image that it is advancing in that program . Faced with an unfavorable balance of forces in Congress, Castillo must have a consolidated left government, serious, without internal conflicts, and on the basis of that consolidation and a solid alliance with the left, which is the first thing, to seek alliances with sectors of the center-right, along the way it will be seen if that is possible ”, says the sociologist and Former Andean parliamentarian Alberto Adrianzén.

In the opinion of the also sociologist Sinesio López, a university professor and columnist for the daily newspaper La República, an alliance of Castillo beyond the left is urgent. “The first challenge for Castillo is to clearly define a viable program of changes, which now he does not have, and on that basis to build a correlation of forces from the left and the center to isolate the far right that seeks to dismiss him. Staying in government with a coup right is a challenge for Castillo, To achieve this, it must consolidate a center-left bloc with a clear program. I believe that there are sectors of the center and center right that can agree on a viable program of changes with the left. Castillo has to know how to handle that. He must seek an agreement to end the possibility that Congress can remove the president and that in turn the president can no longer dissolve Parliament. Your biggest challenge is build and maintain a viable coalition. I think he is now correcting mistakes and moving in that direction. It would have to launch a great mobilizing program, such as Zero Hunger, fundamental at this time when the income of the poor has dropped a lot ”.

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For his part, Juan de la Puente, political scientist, lawyer and director of the political analysis portal Pata Amarilla, points out that “The biggest challenge for Castillo is to stay in powerThis can only be achieved by broadening the base of his government, reaching an agreement with a parliamentary center-right of provincial origin that I believe would be in favor of certain changes, such as on the issues of pensions, monopolies, consumer protection, decentralization, the delivery of aid bonds to vulnerable sectors ”. “Another challenge for the president,” he adds, “is to connect with social demands. The society that demanded changes and that voted for changes when doing so for Castillo feels abandoned. The reason Castillo is disapproved of in the polls is not because of his political position, but because he is not promoting the changes he had offered. Connecting above with the parliamentary center-right and reconnecting below with the popular sectors are the two great challenges for the president ”.

Adrianzén indicates that “to defeat the right-wing coup, Castillo must mobilize the people in the streets and confront that coup in a public political debate ”. “So far it is not responding as it should,” he says. The former Andean parliamentarian points out that the president “has to make the changes he has promised: changes in education, advance further in the second agrarian reform, create employment, insist on tax reform (Congress recently blocked a tax reform to raise taxes on large mining companies favored by the rise in mineral prices and on the richest one percent of the country). And it must have a foreign policy in line with a leftist government, now foreign policy is not bad, but it is timid ”.

The three analysts agree that the president must change a style of government marked by little transparency and with the prominence of a questioned circle of friends.

“I think Castillo,” Sinesio López points out, “is a clean person, but since he doesn’t have a team of people to govern that he knows from before and doesn’t trust the professionals, so he only trusts the family and his countrymen, and there are crooks there. that are being taken advantage of. It must break with the close circle that it has and it has been complicating it. He has to trust the most capable people on the left, who are not in Peru Libre but in that sector that Vladimir Cerrón (general secretary of PL) criticizes as ‘los caviares’ (a term used derogatory by the right to attack an intellectual left , professional, and that now Cerrón repeats), and put her in the government instead of people who do not measure up ”.

Juan de la Puente says that “when people ask Castillo for his achievements, efficiency, they are asking for a change in style”. “His greatest challenge – he says – is to change a style of government of deep mistrust, to maintain a very small presidency, not to relate, not to be held accountable. To achieve the alchemy of the need for changes and consensus, Castillo needs to have a more open circle, have more transparency, better filters for the appointment of officials, recover a discourse of certain changes because empty radicalism is already exhausted, govern for the country and not for Parliament. If the style doesn’t change, that could end up being Castillo’s downfall. ”

A pending challenge for the first teacher to become president is reopen schools to start the new school year with the return to face-to-face classes, a topic in which Peru lags behind in the region.

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