Moral Incapacity: Peru and the Exit That Presidentialism Was Not Supposed to Have

by Juan José Linz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

At seven minutes past midnight on 10 October 2025, the President of the Congress of Peru announced the result of the vote on the motion declaring the permanent moral incapacity of the President of the Republic. There were 122 votes in favour, none against and no abstentions. Dina Boluarte had not come to the chamber to defend herself. Her lawyer complained that there had not been enough time to prepare a defence, and that was true: the motions had been filed on the evening of 9 October, debated from nine o'clock, admitted before midnight and carried a few minutes after it. A few hours later José Jerí, who had presided over the session, was sworn in as President of Peru.

When an outsider reads of this he is tempted to see a coup carried out with ballots, and when a Peruvian reads of it he is tempted to see an ordinary night's business. I want to argue that both readings miss what is interesting, and that the case requires me to revise, though not to withdraw, an argument I made a long time ago.

I. The argument of 1990

In 1990 I argued in the Journal of Democracy that presidential government carries certain dangers that parliamentary government does not, and that these dangers are greatest where democracy is new and the party system weak. Briefly, there were three.

The first is dual legitimacy. In a presidential system the president and the legislature are both elected by the people, and both can claim to speak for it. When they disagree, no democratic principle decides which of them is right. In a parliamentary system the question does not arise, because the government exists only as long as the parliament tolerates it.

The second is rigidity. The president is elected for a fixed term. If he loses the confidence of the country, of the legislature, of his own party, he still remains in office until the term ends, unless he resigns, dies or is removed by an impeachment procedure designed for crimes, not for failure. A parliamentary government in the same situation falls on a vote of no confidence, and a new government is formed or elections are held. The crisis has an exit. In the presidential case it often has none, or rather the only exit lies outside the constitution, and in the Latin America of my lifetime that meant the barracks.

The third is the zero-sum character of presidential elections. One person wins the whole executive. The losers, even if they won forty-nine per cent of the vote, get nothing for the full term. This encourages polarisation and discourages the coalition-making that is the daily work of parliamentary democracy.

I was criticised for this argument, sometimes fairly. Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Shugart showed that much depended on the powers of the president and on the party system, not only on the separation of origin and survival. José Antonio Cheibub showed that presidential democracies had often died in countries where democracy of any kind was likely to die, and that the military, not the constitution, explained much of it. I accept a good part of these corrections. But no one, I think, quite anticipated Peru.

II. The record

Peru appears at first sight to have answered my second objection. Its constitution of 1993, in Article 113, provides that the presidency becomes vacant upon the death of the president, upon the acceptance of his resignation, upon his leaving the country without permission, and upon "permanent moral or physical incapacity" declared by the Congress. In the past quarter-century the last of these grounds has come to be used in a way its drafters can hardly have intended.

Consider the record. In November 2000 Alberto Fujimori, having fled to Japan, sent his resignation by fax. The Congress refused to accept it and instead, by 62 votes to nine, declared him permanently morally incapacitated. One can hardly object to that case. A president who flees abroad and resigns by fax has left the office empty, and the Congress only gave the fact its name.

The later cases are different. In December 2017 Pedro Pablo Kuczynski survived a first vacancy motion with the help of a group of legislators around Kenji Fujimori. In March 2018, before a second vote, legislators of Keiko Fujimori's party, Fuerza Popular, released videos in which allies of the president, among them Kenji Fujimori, appeared to be offering public works in exchange for votes against the motion. Kuczynski resigned on 21 March. His vice-president, Martín Vizcarra, succeeded him. In September 2019 Vizcarra, in open conflict with a Congress dominated by Fuerza Popular, interpreted the Congress's insistence on electing judges to the Constitutional Tribunal as a refusal of confidence in his government and dissolved it under Article 134. The Tribunal upheld him by four votes to three in January 2020. On 9 November 2020 the new Congress removed him for moral incapacity by 105 votes to 16. His successor, Manuel Merino, the President of the Congress, lasted less than a week; two young men were killed in the protests against him, and he resigned. Francisco Sagasti, chosen by the Congress, served out the term.

Pedro Castillo, elected in 2021, faced two vacancy motions and survived both. On 7 December 2022, hours before the third, he announced on television that he was dissolving the Congress and would govern by decree. The Congress removed him the same day, by 101 votes to six, with ten abstentions. His vice-president, Dina Boluarte, succeeded him, and survived several motions supported mainly by the left until, in October 2025, the right withdrew its support and she fell in the night as I have described.

Then the record becomes almost comic. José Jerí, having become President of the Republic as President of the Congress, was accused of undeclared meetings with a Chinese businessman. To remove him by vacancy would have needed 87 votes, two-thirds of the 130 members. But since he had reached the presidency as the presiding officer of the Congress, his opponents instead censured him in that capacity, which needed only a simple majority. On 17 February 2026 they did so, by 75 votes to 24. The next day the Congress elected one of its own members, José María Balcázar, aged eighty-three, by 60 votes to 54. On 28 July 2026 Keiko Fujimori, who won the run-off of 7 June by 50.13 per cent to 49.87, about 49,600 votes in eighteen million, took the oath before the new Congress. By one count she is the ninth president of Peru in ten years.

III. Classification

The typologist's first duty is to resist the obvious label. Is this a democracy in breakdown? Not in the sense I gave the word in 1978. No president has been removed by the army. Each removal followed a procedure written in the constitution, decided by elected representatives, and recognised, however grudgingly, by the courts and by the armed forces. Aníbal Pérez-Liñán saw the beginning of this pattern in his study of presidential impeachment in Latin America: crises that would once have ended in a coup now ended in a vote, and the regime survived the fall of the president. Peru has carried the pattern further than any other country.

Is it, then, parliamentarism by other means? This is the more tempting error, and it is the one I most needed to test, since if Peru had become parliamentary in practice, its instability would count against me. It is not parliamentary, and the differences are instructive.

In a parliamentary system a vote of no confidence is not an accusation against a person. It is the withdrawal of support from a government, and above all it has consequences for the majority that withdraws it. That majority must either form a new government, and so take responsibility for governing, or face a dissolution and go back to the voters. The German Basic Law, in Article 67, goes further and allows the Bundestag to remove a chancellor only by electing a successor in the same vote. The power to bring down a government is tied to the obligation to provide one.

The Peruvian vacancy has none of this discipline. The majority that removes a president does not have to govern. The successor is the vice-president, if one remains, or the president of the Congress, or someone the Congress elects from among its members, and he rules for what is left of the term with no mandate of his own and no majority committed to him. The Congress is not dissolved and does not go to the voters. The president's power of dissolution exists in the constitution, but it is hedged with conditions, Vizcarra's use of it in 2019 was upheld by a single vote in the Tribunal, and Castillo's attempt to use it without the constitutional conditions was an attempt at an autogolpe that ended his presidency within hours. The exit opens in one direction only.

Nor is the ground of removal political in the parliamentary sense. A British prime minister who loses a vote of confidence is not declared morally incapable. The Peruvian formula turns a political judgement into a personal one. The president is not told that the Congress no longer supports his policy. He is told that he is unfit. That is the language of delegitimation, and it is spoken in the same chamber every few years, so that the presidency itself, not only its occupant, loses authority. A president at two per cent approval, as Boluarte was at the end, cannot govern. But a presidency that the public expects to end early cannot govern either, because no one makes long commitments to it.

The Jerí episode is the exception that shows the rule. The only removal in this series that was formally a censure by simple majority, which is to say the only one that worked like a parliamentary vote, was possible because the president was not an elected president at all. He held the highest office as a parliamentary officer, and the Congress treated him as one. The country thus had, in February 2026, a parliamentary executive for a few months by accident, and the Congress chose its head by a margin of six votes.

My conclusion is that Peru has not solved the problem of rigidity. It has kept dual legitimacy and the fixed term of the legislature, and added to them a power of removal that is not balanced by responsibility. I would classify the result as a presidential system in which the legislature exercises a veto over the president's survival without becoming answerable for the government that follows. The rigidity has not disappeared. It has moved from the president to the Congress, which can remove and cannot be removed.

IV. Semi-loyalty within the rules

In The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes I made much of the semi-loyal opposition: parties that take part in the democratic game but are willing, when it suits them, to encourage or tolerate those who would end it, or to use its rules to destroy its spirit. The test I suggested was whether a party would join forces with the disloyal against the loyal, or whether it was ready to defend the regime even when its opponents governed.

Peru teaches something I did not stress enough. Semi-loyalty need not lead to the barracks. It can stay entirely within the constitution and still erode the regime, because every institution can be used for a purpose other than the one it was designed for. A vacancy clause meant for a president who has fled, gone mad or committed a crime becomes an ordinary weapon of opposition. A power of dissolution meant to resolve deadlock becomes, in Vizcarra's reading of a "factual" denial of confidence, a weapon of the executive, and in Castillo's hands nearly a self-coup. Each actor can cite an article. Each act, taken alone, is defensible to a lawyer. Taken together, they produce a regime in which no one expects any mandate to last, and in which the voter's choice of president is provisional in a way the constitution does not say and the voter did not intend.

In Weimar the danger came from a president with emergency powers and a Reichstag that could not form a majority for anything except overthrowing governments. Peru is almost the reverse: a Congress fragmented in everything except the will to remove, facing presidents who often have no party worth the name. Castillo was soon at odds with the party that had nominated him. Boluarte governed without a party of her own. The common element is a legislature that can unite against but not for. That is the clearest sign of semi-loyalty I know, and it is no less dangerous for being expressed in motions rather than manifestos.

V. The new Congress and its blocking third

The return to a bicameral Congress was meant, among other things, to restrain this. The constitutional reform published on 20 March 2024 created a Senate of sixty and a Chamber of Deputies of a hundred and thirty, both elected for the first time in April 2026. The rules of the two chambers, approved in November 2025, provide that a motion of vacancy must now pass the Chamber of Deputies by two-thirds, 87 votes, and then the Senate by two-thirds, 40 votes.

Now look at the arithmetic of the Senate that sat for the first time this July. Fuerza Popular holds 22 of its 60 seats. Since 40 votes are needed and only 38 senators belong to other parties, no vacancy can pass while the president's own senators remain loyal to her. For the first time in a decade Peru has a president who cannot be removed by her opponents alone.

I do not draw from this any conclusion about the person. It is a structural observation, and it would hold for any party with more than a third of the Senate. But it is worth seeing what the structure does. The president who has this protection was elected with 17.19 per cent of the vote in the first round and a margin of about a quarter of one per cent in the second. Her opponent's party is the second force in both chambers. Half the country voted against her, and that half now has no means of removal, no share of the executive, and four years and ten months to wait. My third peril, the zero-sum election, has returned with full force at the very moment that the second, rigidity, has been restored by a party's discipline. A system that was too easy to escape has become, for this president, impossible to escape, and nothing has been done about the dual legitimacy that made escape so desirable.

There is also an irony that a historian of the Spanish transition cannot ignore. The last president removed for moral incapacity before the present cycle was her father, in 2000. The presidency that fell in 2018 fell partly because her party's legislators released the videos. The device is now held, for the first time, by the party that has used it most. Institutions are not owned by the people who build them, and the actors who learn their uses best are seldom those who designed them.

VI. What would follow

I am not going to recommend that Peru adopt a parliamentary constitution. I have learned that this advice is seldom taken and that, when it is taken without a party system to sustain it, it may produce only rapidly changing governments instead of rapidly changing presidents. Thirty-four candidates registered for the first round in 2026. A parliamentary system with that party system would not be Westminster. It would look more like the French Fourth Republic, or worse.

But the Peruvian case does suggest what any reform must do. The power to remove must be tied to responsibility for what follows. A Congress that declares the president incapable should face the voters itself, at the same time as the new president, so that removal is never free. "Moral incapacity" should be defined, or replaced by a procedure that names the offences or the conditions, so that the language of political disagreement is not the language of personal disqualification. And the president's power of dissolution and the Congress's power of removal should be made symmetrical and costly, so that each side thinks twice before using its weapon, as each side does in a parliamentary system.

None of this addresses the deeper problem, which is that the parties are not organisations that last long enough to be responsible for anything. Here my critics were right: institutions matter less than the parties that inhabit them. Yet the institutions shape the parties too. A system in which a party can bring down a government without ever having to form one teaches parties to oppose, not to govern.

The vote of 10 October 2025 was announced at seven minutes past midnight, to a chamber the accused had not entered. The next one, if there is one, will need 87 deputies and then 40 senators. In the Senate the count can already be made: sixty seats, and twenty-two of them held by the president's party, two more than a third.

Sources consulted in the writing of this essay: Directorio Legislativo, "Motion of Vacancy: The Peruvian Congress Mechanism to Remove Presidents" (directoriolegislativo.org); JURIST, "Peru Congress removes President Boluarte from office on moral incapacity grounds" (October 2025); Wikipedia, "Impeachment of Dina Boluarte", "Censure of José Jerí", "2026 Peruvian general election", "Second impeachment of Martín Vizcarra", "Impeachment of Pedro Castillo", "Pedro Pablo Kuczynski", "Judgment of the Constitutional Court of Peru over the dissolution of Congress on 30 September 2019"; GIS Reports, "Peru to elect president but congress in charge" (January 2026); UPI, "Leftist lawmaker Jose Maria Balcazar becomes Peru's interim president" (19 February 2026); Al Jazeera, "Keiko Fujimori sworn in as Peru president after narrow election win" (28 July 2026); CNN, "Keiko Fujimori declared winner of razor-edge Peru election" (3 July 2026); France 24, "Peru's embattled President Kuczynski resigns ahead of impeachment vote" (21 March 2018); NPR, "Peru president" (21 November 2000); Gestión, "La vacancia presidencial en el Congreso bicameral: ¿cuántos votos se necesitarán?"; El Peruano, Ley 31988, de reforma constitucional que restablece la bicameralidad (20 March 2024). Works referred to: Juan J. Linz, "The Perils of Presidentialism", Journal of Democracy 1:1 (1990); Juan J. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (1978); Scott Mainwaring and Matthew Soberg Shugart, eds., Presidentialism and Democracy in Latin America (1997); José Antonio Cheibub, Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy (2007); Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, Presidential Impeachment and the New Political Instability in Latin America (2007).

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Iōanne Iōsēphō Linziō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Juan José Linz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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