One of the dilemmas that Keiko Fujimori must have resolved at the time of her assumption of power is whether she places the president of the Council of Ministers in his real place, calling him as he should, or maintains the mistaken and customary distorting title of “prime minister.”
It is a question of choosing between a formal factor of stability and an informal one of crisis.
Being or not being “prime minister” is an uncomfortable element to clear up in a country like ours, full of power rituals.
This is a position that simply does not exist. It is part of the defects of our hybrid presidential system, which adorns the investiture of the president of the Council of Ministers with that inadequate and bombastic title, typical of the parliamentary system.
If for practical purposes and for media headlines the name of president of the Council of Ministers is too long, his simplification as chief of staff would be good. Of course, the correction—by means of a simple official declaration—might not please some who are excited about the aura of future prime ministers more than with the government tasks they would like to perform, nor by others who show off their CVs as former prime ministers as if they had once governed a nation.
The president of the Council of Ministers is constitutionally second in command in the current government exercise and authorized spokesperson after the head of state. This is what a general manager represents in the private corporate structure in supervising the fulfillment of goals and objectives by central managers, who would be the ministers of State.
The Council of Ministers has a determining weight in the direction and management of public services, including the most sensitive ones: security, health, education, transportation, economy, justice and foreign relations. Hence, the president has to exhibit a high political-executive stature, something like a CEO in search of competitive and transcendent results, very far from being a bishop willing to bridge a presidential vacuum or a fuse operator to contain the erosion of political power.
The general restoration that Keiko Fujimori wants to make a reality from the government will largely depend on the putting in order of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, since it is about providing the state structure with a high degree of efficiency, stability and balance in its direction, management and administration, with concrete and visible results.
Returning confidence to the country with a change of this nature will not make us miss a “prime minister” unloaded from the cloud and far removed, from his name, from the sense of reality.
Thus, with a PCM put in its true place, Keiko Fujimori will not have to face an unnecessary distortion in her power structure. Rather, he will see his functions of government and State much better defined, without the interference of someone worried about how to be “prime minister” where there is precisely no constitutional space to be one.
