Eight presidents in less than a decade. That is the toll exacted by Peru's constitutional system since 2016 — and with the ouster of José Jerí, reported by CNN, that count has reached a figure that places Peru in a category of democratic dysfunction with few parallels among nations that retain the formal architecture of constitutional governance.
The roster warrants enumeration, because the list itself is the argument. Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned in 2018 under the threat of impeachment. Martín Vizcarra was impeached in 2020. Manuel Merino held the presidency for fewer than two weeks before mass protests forced his resignation. Francisco Sagasti served as transition president. Pedro Castillo attempted an auto-coup in December 2022 and was himself removed and arrested. Dina Boluarte, who succeeded him, survived years of protest and scandal before her own departure. The names that followed continued the pattern. Now Jerí.
The mechanism that has produced this carousel of removals is Peru's "moral incapacity" clause — Article 113 of the constitution, which permits Congress to remove a sitting president by a two-thirds majority vote on grounds of permanent moral incapacity. The provision was designed as a last resort for extraordinary circumstances. It has become a routine legislative instrument.
The structural problem is not the provision itself but the relationship between the presidency and Congress that Peruvian politics has produced. Peru's electoral system generates highly fragmented parliaments in which no party commands a sustainable majority, and in which cross-party alliances form and dissolve around specific political calculations rather than programmatic coherence. A congressional majority has both the incentive and the constitutional means to remove any president who poses a threat to the interests those legislators represent.
The result is a system in which the constitutional framework itself appears incompatible with stable democratic governance — where the formal rules of the game continuously undermine the legitimacy of the institutions playing it.
Peru is not a marginal state. It is a nation of 33 million people, the world's second-largest copper producer, a significant contributor to global lithium reserves, and a Pacific-facing economy with deep trade ties to both China and the United States. The continued instability of its governing institutions has direct consequences for its development trajectory, for investor confidence in its extractive industries, and for the populations — disproportionately rural and indigenous — whose access to state services depends on a government capable of sustained policy implementation.
International observers and Peruvian civil society organisations have argued for years that constitutional reform is essential. The same congressional dynamics that produce presidential removals have consistently blocked any reform process that might alter the balance of institutional power.
With Jerí's departure, Peru begins yet another cycle of transitional governance. The damage to democratic institutions accumulates with each iteration — not as a sudden crisis but as a slow erosion, presidency by presidency, of the expectation that elected government can govern.
