The present article accounts for the events of the year 2019, focusing on the serious political crisis between the government and the Congress and its institutional outcome. The article explains how this crisis escalated in 2019 due to the corruption scandals seriously involving the country’s political class. This crisis reached a turning point when President Martín Vizcarra dissolved the Congress in September with high public support. Yet the constitutional order was not broken and both the government and the country exhibited a surprising institutional continuity. Moreover, elections to replace the dissolved Congress were held without major incidents. On the one hand, the article argues that the institutional solution to the political crisis is related to the continuing loss of prestige of the Peruvian political class due to the corruption scandals. The possibility of social unrest linked to the dissolution of the congress, therefore, decreased. On the other hand, the weakness and flexibility of the Peruvian system made possible the rise of an independent politician to the top of the government, who, fortunately, was an institutionalist rather than an authoritarian leader. The article concludes that the overall outcome was contingent – it does not solve the structural problems of the Peruvian democracy as continuous sources of instability.
