The plenary session of the Peruvian Congress approved this Thursday in its first vote the return to parliamentary bicameralism, an initiative that must be ratified in a second vote and is contrary to the result of a 2018 referendum in which 90.5% of voters opposed this change.
The legislators approved the proposal of the right-wing Avanza País party with 93 votes in favor, while 28 voted against, but, since it is a constitutional reform, It must be ratified in a second vote in the next legislature that begins next March.
The substitute text of the constitutional reform includes the re-election of parliamentarians, an option that had been eliminated in 2018 in the same referendum that also rejected the return to bicameralism.
The president of the Constitution Commission, Martha Moyano, declared in supporting the reform opinion that The Chamber of Deputies will have preeminence over political control and the Senate over regulatory control, which will result in having a better quality of laws, if the reform is finally ratified.
Moyano added that the proposal has a complementary provision that repeals the article of the Constitution that prevented the immediate re-election of legislators for a subsequent period in the same position.
Likewise, the legislator from the Fujimori alliance Fuerza Popular added that the quota for indigenous peoples should not be in the Constitution, but in the organic law that is approved with the reform.
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In statements to the press, Moyano responded to criticism for having also included re-election and stated that If they are “bad parliamentarians”, citizens “will not vote” for them againbut defended that “experience is needed” to be in Congress.
Among the legislators who opposed the return of bicameralism, Congresswoman Ruth Luque, of the leftist Democratic Change, declared that this initiative did not reach the 87 votes required to be approved on several previous occasions and that she did not want to submit it to a referendum again. .
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According to Peruvian law, Since it is a constitutional reform, it must reach 87 of the 130 votes in two votes in both legislatures. If a simple majority is obtained, it is submitted to a referendum.
However, “this Congress wants, behind the citizens’ backs, to impose bicameralism,” in addition to proposing the re-election of parliamentarians, he said.
The Peruvian Congress became unicameral after the self-coup in 1992 by former President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) which, in the midst of a political confrontation with the Legislature, ordered its closure and the intervention of the judiciary, among other measures.
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Subsequently, Fujimori convened a Constituent Congress that birthed the current Magna Carta, with a unicameral system.
At the moment, The Peruvian Parliament has an approval rating of around 10% of the population, according to private surveys, which reflects a crisis in this power of the State that worsened in the pandemic with the dismissal of former president Martín Vizcarra (2018-2020) and continued with that of his successors Manuel Merino (2020) and Pedro Castillo (2021-2022).
EFE
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