PERU
Kicking and Screaming
If Peruvian legislators want President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski gone, they’d better start collecting the votes for an official impeachment – because Kuczynski has no plans to quit.
“I won’t resign,” Bloomberg reported the president as saying in Lima on Monday. “It’s not a personal matter, it’s an institutional matter. I was elected for five years and I’ll complete the five years.”
Opposition lawmakers had called for him to step down and claimed to have fresh evidence the president lied to Congress about an alleged conflict of interest to do with contracts awarded to the controversy-plagued Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht SA.
But Kuczynski rejected those claims and blamed their zeal to oust him on his decision to pardon former President Alberto Fujimori at the end of December.
Notably, some observers speculate that pardon helped the president escape a prior impeachment bid by splitting the opposition Popular Force party led by Fujimori’s son and daughter. However, last week the leftist party Nuevo Peru said it is discussing plans for another impeachment effort when Congress returns from recess next month.
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