The first impeachment process against Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, then the incumbent President of Peru since 2016, was initiated by the Congress of Peru on 15 December 2017. According to Luis Galarreta, the President of the Congress, the whole process of impeachment could have taken as little as a week to complete.[1] This event was part of the second stage of the political crisis generated by the confrontation between the Government of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski and the Congress, in which the opposition Popular Force had an absolute majority.
The impeachment request was rejected by the congress on 21 December 2017, for failing to obtain sufficient votes for the deposition.[2]
Upon the initiation of impeachment proceedings Congress president Luis Galarreta stated that he expected Kuczynski to be removed from office ″within a week″, as Kuczynski's Peruvians for Change party occupies only 18 of the 130 seats in Congress, while the opposition right-wingPopular Force (which is chaired by Keiko Fujimori) and left-wingBroad Front (headed by a former priest and environmental activist called Marco Arana), both in favor of Kuczynski's removal, together command 81 of the necessary two-thirds congressional majority (87 seats) needed to remove a president from office. According to reports by the Reuters news agency, Kuczynski had also lost the support of his own cabinet members, who had begun to urge him to resign as well. On 14 December 2017 he was also given an ultimatum by the congressional opposition to resign by the end of the day or face impeachment in Congress, to which he responded by saying: "It cost us a lot to get our democracy back. We're not going to lose it again. I'm not going to give up my honour, nor my values, nor my responsibilities as president of all Peruvians."[3]
Vote in the Congress of the Republic
Partisan makeup of the Congress of the Republic (16 December 2017)
