Peru’s newly restored bicameral Congress has opened its first legislative session with a long list of unfinished business, including mining formalization, public security, and education, but experts say the two-chamber structure will make passing any of it harder.
Francesco Tucci, a political science lecturer at UPC, said not all unfinished bills die in the same way. If a measure was never put to a full-chamber vote, it may remain in committee, go to archive depending on its status, or be taken up again through fresh political prioritization in a new session.
Under the bicameral system, any bill must now pass through the Chamber of Deputies before moving to the Senate. Tucci said this adds a second layer of debate, correction, and political oversight. He added that while the process may become more thorough, the obvious cost is time: more stages, more negotiation, and a greater chance that a bill will be amended or stalled.
Reforms Experts Say Cannot Wait
Marisol Vargas, a political scientist at the Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, said the priority should not simply be to revive old bills but to address the national public security system, disaster and risk management for threats such as El Nino and earthquakes, so-called pro-crime laws, the public transport system, and weak anti-corruption rules.
Human Rights Watch has warned that certain laws weaken efforts to dismantle criminal organizations and their links to corrupt officials. Vargas and Tucci both pointed to laws 31751 and 31990, which alter the definition of organized crime and create obstacles to police searches, along with law 32108, which Congress declined to repeal despite public opposition. Legislators have argued those laws are intended to strengthen police and judicial work against rising crime.
On education, Vargas cautioned that the new bicameral structure risks creating a bottleneck, driven not only by efficiency problems but also by partisan conflicts of interest. She said the return to bicameralism, which she described as distant from popular will given the bureaucratic costs and extra time it can generate, should at least guarantee the technical quality that has already been lost.
What Gets Prioritized
Tucci said the bills most likely to move forward are those with direct economic or institutional impact, including regulatory simplification, private investment incentives, and the removal of administrative barriers. He added that measures which accumulated committee work in the previous session and need only a procedural push also tend to advance more quickly.
Both experts agreed that reforms should be assessed on genuine criteria of urgency, cost, benefit, and effectiveness. They cautioned, however, that party interests ultimately control the legislative agenda and can delay any reform that conflicts with those interests.
