Peru’s Prime Minister, Alberto Otárola, has urged Congress to take a decision as soon as possible on the call for early elections, one of the demands being made these days by thousands of people who are also protesting the arrest of Pedro Castillo and the permanence in office of Dina Boluarte.
«Let them decide, but let them decide now because we need to call elections and establish an electoral calendar (…) what the country urgently requires is that the electoral calendar is defined and that is the responsibility of the Congress», expressed the Peruvian ‘premier’.
In this sense, he has come out to defend the figure of Boluarte, recalling that she has already presented a constitutional reform project to bring forward the elections to April 2024, which is waiting to be ratified in a second vote.
However, the demonstrators are demanding that the elections be brought forward to 2023, a demand that has been echoed by some political forces, most recently Fuerza Popular, whose proposal to hold them in December 2023 has been described by Otárola as «audacious» and insists on Congress to resolve the issue.
It has been eight weeks since thousands of people took to the streets demanding the release of Castillo, an advance of the elections and the formation of a constituent assembly and the departure of Boluarte, requests some of them flatly denied by a government under suspicion and criticism for the more than fifty deaths registered during the repression of the protests.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
