Jorge Nieto, president of Peru's Partido del Buen Gobierno (PBG) and a former presidential candidate, said his party's congressional bloc would support the legislative powers requested by President Keiko Fujimori's government from Congress.
Speaking at a meeting at his party's headquarters, Nieto said they would grant the government everything that was urgent so that it would have no more excuses and could govern.
Nieto also criticized the government for making its response to citizen insecurity conditional on Congress approving the special powers. He recalled that he had already warned, during the presidential debate, that Fujimori's government would lack the capacity to confront crime.
He said the only thing they were now being told was that the government wanted excuses, because it did not know how to govern or how to tackle security problems.
Nieto added that he had told Fujimori during the presidential debate that what she guaranteed would be more signs of blackmail and extortion, more killings every day and rising insecurity, and that this was exactly what the country was now seeing. He said he regretted having been right.
Party's position still under review
However, deputies Fernando García and Nora Llaque, both from Nieto's bloc, said the group's overall position on the request was still being evaluated. They suggested the powers should be reviewed subject by subject rather than approved as a single package.
García said there were issues among the request that were not urgent.
The Executive's request for 66 powers
The Executive formally submitted its request for legislative powers to Congress on August 29, asking for a 120-day period in which to use them. The proposal contains 66 specific measures grouped into eight thematic blocks, covering citizen security, prison reform, migration control, state modernization and economic reactivation, among other areas.
Keiko Fujimori, a longtime figure in Peruvian politics and the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori, now leads the Executive pressing Congress for the powers.
Kidnapping accelerated the pressure
Pressure from Fujimori's government on Congress increased after the kidnapping of Jenss Lara Tantaquilla, a 31-year-old mining businessman, in Trujillo. The incident led the president to call an emergency meeting with the ministers of the Interior and Defense.
Questions over the scope of the request
The request has also drawn criticism because it goes beyond citizen security measures. It includes a proposal to eliminate caps on interest rates, while it does not contain concrete measures to address the El Niño weather phenomenon.
