Amid the wave of popular demonstrations demanding the resignation of President Dina Boluarte, Parliament is set to reconsider a project to boost presidential and parliamentary elections that was rejected by the Congress plenary last Friday.
The project formally fulfills the protests’ demand for the president’s resignation this year, rather than 2024 as approved by Congress, and schedules the first round of elections for October and the installation of the 2024 elect.
The dissenting voices invoked various reasons, and the left did so by rejecting their demand that the elections should be subject to a referendum on the relevance of a constituent assembly.
Against this background, and after the first death of a protester on Saturday night in Lima, the President said in a message that if there is no consensus in Congress today, she will present two initiatives for immediate attention.
It is, he explained, a reform that will allow the elections to take place this year and envisages that before February 28 this year Congress will approve other electoral norms, the one that states that the rules have not been changed in the previous year , to invalidate .to the elections
Such a measure would satisfy the requirement of having time to approve electoral reforms at will, the left said.
Boluarte’s proposal falls short of the protests’ and left-wing benches’ call for a referendum on the constitution, an issue he said is being “used by some political forces to undermine any democratic solution to the current situation.”
He only suggested proposing to the next parliament that it debate the total reform of the 1993 constitution and submit the result to a referendum, despite a poll today showing 69 percent are in favor of a constituent assembly.
The president only referred to the protests to attack their excesses, ignoring those protesters who have been holding a second wave since January 4 with a tally of 47 deaths since December.
Related to the embassy, the poll by the Institute of Peruvian Studies found that 71 percent disapproved of Boluarte’s leadership and 76 percent shared calls for his resignation.
jf/mrs