Peru Congress impeaches President José Jeri

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Jose Balcazar leaves the Faustino Sanchez Carrion building after he was elected as interim president in Lima on Wednesday. japantimes.co.jp

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Peru Ousts President for Second Time in Less Than Six Months time.com

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Peru has done it again: Congress removed President José Jeri after just four months in office, Peru’s second ouster in less than six months and the latest episode in a carousel that has produced eight presidents in eight years. Reuters reports lawmakers then installed 83-year-old José Balcázar as interim president while he simultaneously assumes the speakership—an elegant Peruvian solution to executive–legislative conflict: fuse the branches and call it stability.

According to Reuters via the Japan Times, Jeri’s downfall followed a scandal over undisclosed meetings with a Chinese businessman. Time notes the impeachment was Peru’s second in under six months, underscoring how the country’s “moral incapacity” removal mechanism—originally a safety valve—has become a routine parliamentary weapon. The Mises Institute frames the episode as Congress treating impeachment as a governing tool rather than a constitutional last resort.

The predictable liberal take is that Peru suffers from “polarization” and “institutional crisis.” True but incomplete. The deeper problem is incentive design: a fragmented party system and a Congress that can topple presidents at relatively low political cost create a standing invitation to govern by palace coup. Each president arrives with a thin mandate, faces a legislature with little reason to cooperate, and quickly learns that discretionary power is temporary—so grab what you can, make deals you can’t defend publicly, and hope the next scandal hits someone else.

Balcázar’s mandate is to shepherd the country to general elections in April, per Reuters. But “caretaker” is a misnomer when the caretaker is also the legislature’s chief. If the executive is a disposable figurehead and Congress is the real sovereign, elections become less a choice of government than a periodic reshuffling of who gets to be blamed.

What would reduce the incentive to impeach for sport? One option is to raise the impeachment threshold or narrow the grounds to clearly defined crimes with evidentiary standards closer to a court than a floor vote. Another move: decentralize. If more power and revenue remain local—regions, municipalities, and private civil society—the national executive becomes less of a prize, and legislative coups yield smaller spoils.

Peru’s cycle is often described as a failure of leadership. It looks more like a system that reliably selects for short-term opportunists and then acts surprised when it gets them. Congress keeps speedrunning presidents; the country keeps paying the loading-screen tax.