Monty: You wanna talk about Peru?
Anna: not really. The ice cream place is closed for the winter and-oh, you mean the other one! Yes, I actually am very confused about Peru right now and I’m sure you know things because somehow you know a person and once looked them up for a video about trains and now know a ton of trivia that somehow ties into the situation. Tell me what I need to know about Peru, please.
Monty: I don’t actually know that much about Peru, but after looking up their parliamentary election on Sunday, I find its politics tantalizingly strange.
Peru is a multiparty democracy, but unlike any multiparty democracy I’ve ever seen, it is nevertheless utterly dominated by a single party: the far-right Popular Force, led by Keiko Fujimori, suspected criminal overlord and daughter of disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori.
Despite being convicted of crimes against humanity, the elder Fujimori remains a vaunted figure in Peruvian society for his efforts back in the 1990s to defeat the Marxist Shining Path insurgency and stabilize the national economy. However, while the Popular Force holds a majority in the Congress of the Republic, Peru’s current president, Martin Vizcarra, is a member of the centre-right opposition party, Peruvians for Change (Vizcarra succeeded former president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski after the latter was indicted for money laundering in 2018).
While Peruvians will go to the polls for a joint Congressional and Presidential election in 2021, Vizcarra believes he can wrest control of the Congress away from Fujimori and her cronies now, and thus is holding snap elections. Surprisingly, opinion polls show neither party in the lead– that honor belongs to the centrist Popular Action party. More surprisingly, President Vizcarra’s Peruvians for Change appears to no longer exist. And as is the case so often in multiparty democracy, around 40% of voters polled are undecided, so this remains anybody’s game.
As ever, be respectful of each other, observe the Avocado’s house rules, and do not threaten Mayor McSquirrel.