How long can Peru’s new socialist leader last?

The symbolism could hardly have been clearer when Pedro Castillo was sworn in yesterday as Peru’s new President on the country’s 200th anniversary of independence. For arguably the first time in its history, Peru has a head-of-state who personifies the national majority — a campesino hailing from a particularly impoverished region of the northern Andes — rather than a member, real or honorary, of the largely white Lima elite.

Given Peru’s persistent, stark inequality, drastically exacerbated by the pandemic, perhaps the biggest surprise is that the electorate has waited until now to vote in such a radical left-populist. Although the rabblerousing rural school teacher currently appears to be tacking towards the centre, he had originally promised to nationalise Peru’s vast mining sector and ban imports of any goods already produced domestically.

His first, Marxian campaign manifesto, which he now claims to have ditched, even cited Lenin in asserting that the media can never be free under ‘the yoke of capital’.