Peru 2024: Legislative Aggrandizement and the Protection Racket

Stable Executive-Legislative government coalitions and legislative shielding are key pillars of executive support that had been absent since 2016, but reappeared in 2022 during the government of Dina Boluarte. The current Peruvian political system reflects an expansion of the Legislative branch, resulting from several legislative and constitutional reforms and counter-reforms, which have concentrated greater power in Congress while simultaneously restricting the oversight capabilities of other institutions. The Constitutional Court played a central role in this power reordering. To explain these changes, we argue for the importance of analyzing the political consequences of three shocks to the system that occurred in a relatively short period: the Lava Jato corruption investigations, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Pedro Castillo’s coup d’état. These shocks disrupted the established political class, enabling its renewal, reopened the cleavage between Lima and the rest of the country, and facilitated the emergence of new actors opposed to the political establishment. Finally, they substantially altered the behavior of these new actors toward a reconfiguration of power. The current Congress is highly unrepresentative and engages in political strategies akin to a “protection racket”—it seeks to disqualify potential centrist presidential candidates, eliminates institutional oversight, passes laws to protect its members, and captures state resources to secure these changes.