The possible victory of Rafael López Aliaga in the Mayor’s Office of Lima returns our gaze to Congress, where his Popular Renovation bench is increasingly taking on greater prominence: not only because of the weight of its votes in the Senate, but because of the role played in the Chamber of Deputies.
The strength of Popular Renewal in Congress lies in numbers and politics, and this is a great power that López Aliaga has been boasting about since the campaign. With a municipality of Lima that will begin a new period with a large debt, López Aliaga will need a hand from the government and, in his own words, he is capable of leading marches to the doors of the ministries in order to achieve his objectives.
The government must tread carefully with this situation, since it cannot afford to deal with two oppositions: one from Lima and another from the south (thinking about the victories in Cusco by Verónika Mendoza and in Puno by Roberto Sánchez’s party). President Keiko Fujimori’s great limitation, to date, is her own pro-government bench.
If we review the first section of the debate of the delegation of powers, the Popular Renewal bench was the one that managed to turn around the party that Together for Peru had been winning. Like a good ‘false 9’, the light blue bench attracted the debate of the leftist defenders of the project file, generated spaces for consensus, led and participated in the preparation of the final text, leaving everything ready to return to the area and try to score the goal of deputies in the plenary session.
All that work should have been done by the Fujimori bench, but its deputies arrived late to the game. They only got into the game last week (RP anticipated and presented a substitute text before JP delivered his filing prediction), and several own goals were sent from the Senate (regarding the power to modify what was sent by Deputies), which ended up hindering the entire debate.
The Fujimori bench in Deputies does not have a clear captain. Renovación Popular strategically advances each move under the guidelines of deputy Roxana Rocha. The celestials understood that they are ideological allies, but that does not make them pro-government and that is why they never hesitate to criticize Fujimorism, whether it be the Executive or their peers in Congress.
Another thing that the Popular Renewal bench seems to have understood is that in Congress you need less flower and more action. In a slow Parliament, the celestials advance quickly under the figure of managers and, at least until now, they have not repeated the style of their maximum leader by skipping procedures and laws.
If the delegation of powers is approved in the plenary session of Deputies, the ruling party will be in debt to Renovación Popular. The celestials will have scored their first goal playing as a ‘false 9’, in a match where the government only celebrates not scoring goals against themselves.
