The passage of Fujimorism to power will be this time – if its second round electoral victory is confirmed – the passage of the Fuerza Popular party through the acid test of the real and effective exercise of the government, which historically has wrought, in the life of political parties, more collapses than survivals.
The validity of Fuerza Popular in the last 15 years has the singular liability of having been at the gates of the presidency three consecutive times and the singular asset of having gained an important presence in the congresses of all that time, including the one that Martín Vizcarra unconstitutionally dissolved and the other in which, together with APP, it gave support to the weak presidential transitions (Dina Boluarte, José Jerí and José María Balcázar) that followed Pedro Castillo’s failed coup d’état.
The parliamentary benches are usually in Peru the best refuge for the validity of the parties, against which the electoral demons of each occasion obsessively rage. Vetoes and votes against prevented Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre from coming to power. But nothing prevented Apra, his party, from exercising power from Congress on multiple occasions. Hence, to the extent that the doors of the government were continually closed to it, Fuerza Popular seemed to be approaching the destiny of Apra de Haya.
Regarding Apra, nothing could be more paradoxical than that it came to power once Haya was dead and then with Alan García, embodying another paradox: going from having a bad government from 1985 to 1990 to having a good government from 2006 to 2011, with a final paradox: that Apra’s passage twice through the acid test of power ended up collapsing it.
Where is Alejandro Toledo’s Perú Posible, after his time in the government? Where is the Nationalist Party of Ollanta Humala? Where Peruvians for Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s Kambio? Where is Pedro Castillo’s Peru Libre? Is it that the acid test of the government in Peru is so strong that it ends the parties like this?
We are not going to be filled with paradoxes here, but it is worth recording one more: Keiko Fujimori has made Fuerza Popular, as a party, the fundamental pillar of Fujimorism, against the grain of its founding roots, which rather disbelieved in the value of parties. Remember that Alberto Fujimori decided to dissolve the party with which he had come to power, Cambio 90, before it could even pass the acid test of the government.
The brief lesson we have to draw from these paradoxes is that parties cannot be made only to win elections and warm up seats in congress, but to really govern. That is what Fuerza Popular has to do both to change the history of the country in the last five years and to avoid its collapse as a party.
Being a government for Fuerza Popular will also depend on Keiko Fujimori really wanting it to be like this and not only her, the total incarnation of power in a presidentialism of a monarchical mold like ours.
