Peru: Municipal and regional elections

Partial reconstruction of the right

By Toribio Durand, Movimiento anticapitalista

Last weekend, regional and municipal elections took place in the entire country. This electoral process was regulated by the old laws that imply continuing with the mechanisms that have sustained corrupt and clientelism in the framework of a political crisis that we have already described in several opportunities.

These elections allow us anyways to move forward in some conclusions: there were two big losers, the government with its candidacies of Patria Libre and the Fujimorism of Fuerza Popular. These two forces faced each other in the second round in the last presidential elections, not managing to impose themselves in any of the 19 regions of the country, not managing to surpass the absolutely marginal percentages. There was also no national force that managed to show a significant growth, highlighting then a great dispersion of the vote towards a multitude of organizations and regional or municipal parties with no formal links between them.

In Lima, where 13 of the 35 million inhabitants of the country live, there was a tight triumph of the radical conservative Rafael López Aliaga with 26.287%, followed by the ultra-right-wing Urresti with 25.379%. In third place was George Forsyth (Somos Perú) with 18.937%, followed by Elizabeth León (Frente Esperanza) with 10.914% and Omar Chehade (Alianza para el Progreso) with 7.123%.  This dispute ended up being between centrists and rightists without any left-wing candidate or any of the sectors that supported or support Castillo’s government reaching at least 2 digits.

This setback is expressed in the results obtained by Gonzalo Alegría of Juntos por el Perú with 6.377% and Yuri Castro of Perú Libre with 1.473%. They are the tangible expression of this situation and reflect the consequences of the furious turn to the right of Castillo’s government, the non-fulfillment of electoral promises and the inconsistency and opportunism of the entire Peruvian center-left.   

We are now facing an electoral juncture that is closing and leaves the National Government increasingly weakened and isolated. Once again it is shown that the non-existence of a real alternative for the workers and the popular sectors, favors the right wing that is trying to regroup itself. There is no room for half measures, we must strongly retake the proposal of the call for a great mobilization for a New Constitution, which questions the whole political system and the prevailing injustice in the country. The task is to open a destitution process (what is no longer valid) and a constituent process (what we want to change) and we are convinced that despite this electoral result there is still a great space open for revolutionary socialists. We must urgently debate what changes are urgently needed in political, institutional, judicial, economic, social, etc. matters. We question the current State and we understand that we must discuss who should govern. That is why the mobilization to achieve the Constituent Assembly must be the first step to break away from the big capital.

As we have already said on several occasions, Castillo and the false left only aspire to achieve a utopian Capitalism with a human face. Developing a strategic anti-capitalist policy will allow us to face this new juncture by developing a process of organization with the broadest unity among those of us who really want to turn everything around, so that once and for all those who never governed, the workers, the peasants, the youth and the popular organizations, will govern.