By IPS Correspondents
LIMA, May 31 1998 (IPS)

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori, still thinking of attempting to stand for a third consecutive term in office in the year 2000, can no longer count on half-a-million votes from Protestant church-goers, who played a decisive role in his 1990 triumph.

The Protestants that year made their presence felt in their a crucial role of pulling Fujimori, then an unknown university professor of Japanese origin, from anonymity and helping him defeat Peru’s traditional parties and the internationally reknowned writer Mario Vargas Llosa.

Six evangelical leaders ran on Fujimori’s slate of candidates for parliament, and Protestant pastor Carlos Garcia was his running-mate.

Once in power, Fujimori overcame the enmity of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy and Protestant church leaders abandoned him amid criticism of his neoliberal economic policy, which they said ran counter to the social principles of Christianity. Then Garcia resigned.

The Protestant leaders, who felt cheated, have now begun to organise their own political party: National Fraternity.

The aspiring party will be the fourth with religious roots in Peru, alongside two Christian Democratic parties as well as Frepap, a political group created by a religious sect of Andean origin whose male devotees do not cut their hair and whose women dress in biblical attire.

The coordinators of the projected party have ties to the National Evangelical Council, which groups Peru’s 40 largest Protestant churches and represents – in practice – more than 100 small churches.

In order to qualify and register as a new party, 500,000 signatures are needed, an impossible feat for most aspirants.

But analysts say Protestant churches, whose following is booming in Peru, largely among the poor and marginalised, will have no problem gathering the necessary support. Protestant churches are known for their social activism, and Peruvians professing Protestant faiths are currently estimated at between one and two million.

Felipe Medina, president of the Peruvian Brotherhood of Pastors, said the promoters of the party were aiming for two million signatures, “because the drive for signatures for registering the party will allow us to spread the Christian word on social issues.”

The idea is for National Fraternity to run in the general elections of the year 2000. But the party’s promoters have not yet decided whether to field their own presidential candidate or throw their weight behind another party.

At any rate, the party will field its own list of candidates to parliament.

If Congress fails to amend the electoral code, which grants voters the right to cast their ballots for the candidates of their choice on each slate, the new party will have no problem coming up with a slate of candidates.

But if the system is reformed and the seats go to the candidates who head the most-voted lists, as the traditional parties are pushing for, the unity of the pluralistic evangelical movement would be put to test.

Medina and Juana Avellaneda, of the evangelical movement Lider, say none of the leaders of Peru’s Protestant community have personal political aspirations.

Medina and Avellaneda maintain that the movement’s political aim is to promote a social model based on Christian Democratic principles of solidarity, “contrary to the selfishness of the prevailing neoliberal model.”

Nevertheless, the first political initiatives promoted by Medina and Avellaneda indicate that one of their chief aims is to improve the Protestant community’s bargaining power, especially in order to put an end to the privileges enjoyed by the Catholic Church.

An estimated 90 percent of Peru’s 24 million inhabitants are Catholics, while five percent attend any one of a number of Protestant churches.

The number of Protestant church-goers is on the rise, a phenomenon that disturbs the Catholic Church hierarchy, which attributes it to strong financial backing pouring in from the United States and Europe.

Medina said he would ask Congress to start working on reforming the constitution, “because although article two establishes freedom of worship and prohibits religious discrimination, article 50 says the only religion recognised by the state is Catholicism.”

Avellaneda asked the People’s Defender to support the efforts of Protestant churches to get the governments of Lima and other cities to overturn an ordinance stipulating that Protestant churches must be taxed, as if they were business concerns.

“We want the same treatment enjoyed by Catholic churches, which are exempt from paying taxes,” said Avellaneda.

City officials in Lima and Huancayo, a town in Peru’s central mountain region where Protestant churches are particularly strong, said recently that the question of extending tax exoneration to evangelical churches was on the agenda and would be discussed in the near future.

Political observers say that in both municipalities, political parties are currently negotiating support for tax exempt status for Protestant churches in exchange for their backing in the coming elections.

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