Meet the World’s Least Popular President

In a country riven by deep political, social, and geographic divisions, there are few subjects on which all Peruvians can agree. But the foibles and failures of President Dina Boluarte have given her nation’s populace one unifying opinion: Nobody likes Dina.

In a recent query commissioned by the newspaper El Comercio, the polling firm Datum Internacional found that just 5 percent of Peruvians approve of Boluarte’s performance, while an astounding 92 percent say they disapprove of her administration — a level of unpopularity that cuts across all socioeconomic and regional demographics with little variation.

Boluarte’s approval rating has never cracked 20 percent, according to data gathered by Datum, but she has reached a new nadir of unpopularity amid a devastating wave of crime and extortion that has pushed the capital, Lima, to a breaking point.

“If you look at what day-to-day life is like, people are increasingly afraid of crime, of extortions, of drive-by killings — aside from the fact that the economy is not doing very well,” said Jo-Marie Burt, an associate professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government who has lived and taught in Peru. “Life is very precarious, people are unhappy, and there’s a feeling that the government is not really doing very much.”

Boluarte’s government has made token efforts at restoring order, but the president herself has been keeping such a low profile that she recently went 100 days without speaking directly to reporters.

“You basically have a president who is in hiding,” Peruvian journalist Marco Sifuentes told The Intercept. “People notice that.”

Despite coming to prominence as a leftist, Boluarte has remained in power with the support of a strange coalition of ideologically diverse — but mostly right-wing — parties in Congress. The main factor unifying this alliance is their own self-interest, Burt said.

“The political system has been captured by a bunch of thieves and they’re running the country into the ground,” Burt said. “They’re not legislating for the people. They’re legislating to strengthen their own power to continue stealing from the country and enriching themselves.”

As of May, more than half of legislators in Congress were facing active criminal investigation, according to the news website Infobae. But with their power virtually unchecked, legislators have been busy passing laws defanging oversight from other branches of government and protecting the financial interests of lawmakers and their cronies, according to a March report by the D.C.-based nonprofit Freedom House, which downgraded its rating of Peru from “Mostly Free” to “Partly Free.”

Boluarte, 62, spent much of her career in a modest government job, and only emerged as a national figure in 2021, when she was chosen as the running mate of Pedro Castillo, a school teacher and union leader running for president on the ticket of Peru Libre, a small Marxist party. Castillo’s preferred running mate was Vladimir Cerrón, the leader of Peru Libre, but Cerrón was serving a prison sentence at the time for public corruption.

Together, Castillo and Boluarte rode to victory on a wave of populist anger at the political order, squeaking to victory by just 50,000 votes over Keiko Fujimori, the daughter and political heir to former dictator Alberto Fujimori. In a country still deeply divided between racial, geographic, and class lines that have persisted since colonial times, many saw Castillo’s victory as a repudiation of minority rule and a reclamation of the country by the workers and peasants, mostly mestizo and Indigenous, who make up the vast majority of the population.

“A lot of people identified with him as the first peasant to be president of Peru,” Sifuentes said. “He was more a symbol than anything, really, but symbols are important.”

But once in power, the Castillo administration foundered in the face of a deeply hostile press, a global economic slump that hobbled the country’s mining and trucking sectors, the ongoing ravages of the pandemic, and an obstructionist coalition of right-wing parties that held the majority of seats in Congress.

But perhaps most importantly, Castillo was beset by his own disastrous lack of ability to rule. He cycled rapidly through appointees, including five prime ministers in 16 months.

“I feel bad for him now, even knowing all of the stupid things that he did,” said Sifuentes. “He was an enemy in an enemy zone in Lima, surrounded by people that hated him — starting with the media. And he didn’t know what to do.”

After 17 months of muddling through, Castillo’s presidency ended in a whimper. In December 2022, in an attempt to preempt his own impeachment, Castillo moved to illegally dissolve Congress and was immediately arrested and removed from office. Into the breach stepped Boluarte, who swiftly reneged on an earlier promise to call new elections.

“She told the people, ‘If Castillo goes, I go,’” Sifuentes said. “But then she didn’t go.”

The ouster sparked fierce protests that lasted for months, and security forces responded with brutal repression that left 50 people dead, according to Amnesty International.

“People literally saw her shed her left-wing persona and make an alliance with the right-wing majority in Congress,” said Burt. “And there were enormous protests. And what did the government do? They sent out the army shooting. And no one has had to answer for those crimes. This government pretends like it didn’t happen.”

Boluarte’s popularity has never been high. In March 2023, just three months after taking the reins from Castillo, her approval rate was around 19 percent, and has headed steadily downhill from there. Now, her numbers make some of the most disliked world leaders — South Korea’s Yoon Suk-yeol, with 16 percent approval, or France’s Emmanuel Macron, with 18 percent — look like prom kings.

The current slide to the bottom appears to have begun last spring, thanks to a saga that has become known as “Rolexgate.” In April, after Sifuentes and his colleagues on the political podcast La Encerrona reported on the suspicious number of luxury watches Boluarte was wearing in public appearances, police raided Boluarte’s home on the order of prosecutors looking into whether she was illegally enriching herself or accepting bribes.

In direct response to the raid, Boluarte’s allies in Congress fast-tracked a law that narrowed the definition of what constitutes “organized crime,” and instituted a requirement that a defense attorney be present for any police raid. Critics said the measure gives criminals precious time to destroy evidence.

In the months since the passage of that law, which critics have dubbed the “pro-organized crime law,” Lima has been gripped by an explosion of violent crime and extortion. In September, the city ground to a halt as private bus operators banded together in a strike to protest the government’s failure to protect against extortion. Police responded by beating protesters.

“The raid of Dina Boluarte was in April, this law was passed in July on a fast track, and in August this crime wave started,” Sifuentes told The Intercept. “It was really immediate.”

In a separate poll, 87 percent of Peruvians said they feel unsafe on the streets of Lima, according to El Comercio.

Thanks to her alliance with the bloc of political parties controlling Congress, there is little to stop Boluarte from serving out the rest of the term originally allotted to Castillo. Elections are currently scheduled for 2026.

“That’s a long slog for a government that has a 5-percent popularity rating,” Burt said. “But on the other hand, they have insulated themselves pretty well from public opinion.”

Under the Peruvian Constitution, a president may not be elected to consecutive terms. So when the end of her term comes around, clues from the recent past may hint as to what Boluarte’s future holds.

Peruvian politicians — and especially presidents — have a remarkable talent for winding up in prison, and every person elected president since 1985 has faced prosecution for acts of repression or corruption carried out during their time in office. One former president, Alejandro Toledo, was extradited to Peru last year to face charges of corruption and was sentenced on Monday to 20 years in prison; another former president, Alan García, took his own life in 2019 rather than face arrest.

“She has to know her destiny is in prison,” Sifuentes told The Intercept. “That is our country: Nearly all our presidents are in prison.”