The businessman and leader of the Popular Renovation party, Rafael López Aliaga, was sworn in this Sunday afternoon as the new mayor of Metropolitan Lima, the position considered the second most important in the country after the national presidency.
“By God, for those who have less, for Lucho Castañeda Lossio, I do swear,” he said when he took office, referring to the late former mayor of the Lima city whom he considers his political mentor.
The ceremony that was held at the Gran Teatro Municipal was attended by the recently inaugurated national president, Dina Boluarte, and the president of Congress, José Williams.
It is important to clarify that Dina, despite belonging to the communist party that led Pedro Castillo to the presidency, agreed with Williams on a right-wing cabinet as a condition for her to finish her term as an interim without calling early elections.
For the first time in a long time, and after years of political crisis in Peru, the three main offices of the country, that of the President of the Republic, the President of the National Congress and the Mayor of Metropolitan Lima, are aligned and in the hands of the right.
López Aliaga was in charge of taking an oath to the 39 councilors that will make up the cabinet, known as the Metropolitan Council, during his municipal administration for the period 2023-2026.
Rafael López Aliaga won the mayoralty of Lima in a hard-fought election where the right-wing vote was extremely divided. According to the official results of the ONPE, “Porky” obtained a total of 26.34% of votes; while Daniel Urresti, from Podemos Peru, obtained 25.34%.
Thus, he replaces the architect Miguel Romero Sotelo in the mayor’s office, who held office from May to December 2022; after the vacancy of Jorge Muñoz. López Aliaga has the enormous challenge of bringing stability to the Peruvian capital, after years of institutional crises and corruption that accompanied the riots at the national level.
At the national level, all the polls place him as a favorite in an eventual presidential election, therefore many speculated if he would be a candidate for president in the event that Dina Boluarte anticipated the elections. Finally, Dina agreed with Williams and López Aliaga and for the moment, there would be no early elections in Peru.
This unlocks the outlook for López Aliaga, and he will be able to govern calmly for at least the first years of his term as head of Lima, with enormous influence on national politics. “Mrs. Dina has set up a respectable technical office, I have several friends in the office, there are people with whom you can work, you can talk,” he later declared. “Compared to those that Castillo designated, one was worse than the other and lasted a week.”
“It was a government that really was not a government, a year and a half has been lost, Peru should have grown at 8% or 9% per year, we have lost the very important rise in mineral prices, Peru has become a mess” , he emphasized in reference to the regime of the former communist ruler, of which he was one of the staunchest opponents.
With information from La Derecha Diario