By Gwynne Dyer
Could there be anything more ridiculous than last week’s failed coup attempt in Peru?
Last Wednesday morning, President Pedro Castillo made an unscheduled broadcast announcing that he was dissolving Congress, suspending the constitution, and would rule the country by decree. But within minutes he was abandoned by his own ministers, in a few hours he was impeached by Congress, and he was in jail by dinner-time.
The baby-faced 53-year-old president was never a credible occupant of the office. He had no experience of government before being elected two years ago. Once in office, however, Castillo displayed much skill and enthusiasm in diverting public funds into his own pockets: bribes, fake contracts, selling government jobs, etc.
Even in Peru this is bound to attract public disapproval, and most of the people who joined his government quit again within months. (Five prime ministers in two years.) Soon the Peruvian Congress was trying to impeach him.
By last week his opponents thought they had a majority to start the impeachment process, so he launched his ‘autogolpe’ (‘self-coup’), following in the footsteps of a previous Peruvian president who overthrew his own elected government and ruled as a dictator.
But where Alberto Fujimori succeeded in 1992, Castillo failed in 2022.
He failed because most of Peru’s 33 million people saw his action as illegitimate.
The country has been going through a bad patch, but its people have concluded that respect for the constitution is good, while coups and dictators are bad.
Vice-President Dina Boluarte took over the presidency smoothly with Congress’s blessing, while Castillo wound up behind bars.
Well done Peru, but there was something even more ridiculous than Castillo’s attempted coup last week.
Due to some sort of intercontinental quantum entanglement, a group of quite respectable German citizens were also plotting a coup, and on the very same day they too ended up in jail.
Three thousand police carried out 130 raids across Germany and arrested 23 members of this largely internet-based organisation.
As many more people are still being sought. They included doctors, retired army officers, a former member of parliament, an ex-judge, even a celebrity chef – and they almost all had guns stashed away.
Their goal was to storm the Bundestag (German parliament), overthrow the government, and revive the long-dead kingdom of Germany. All musical-comedy stuff, except that the guns were real.
Many of the plotters were also anti-vaxxers, and a leading Swiss newspaper was probably right to dismiss the group as “fifty loons”. Certainly the constitution of the German Federal Republic was never in danger.
However, big lies do sometimes take hold. They could do so even before the internet, as a previous generation of Germans could attest to. And no country is immune, no matter how old and secure its democracy may seem.
One-third of American voters continue to believe the Big Lie that Trump really won the 2020 presidential election. And Trump, still firmly wedded to that lie, chose last Wednesday to issued a particularly incendiary post on his own personal Twitter clone, ‘Truth Social’.
He said that the “mass fraud” that he claims lost him that election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
Trump seems to be talking about suspending or even ‘terminating’ the US constitution in order to reverse the 2020 election, but he’s not really talking about the past. He’s talking about the future.
