That 1931 proved a pivotal year in Peruvian politics is certainly true: the election that year, following the overthrow of President Augusto Leguía the year before, saw new entrants into the political arena, notably Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre's Partido Aprista Peruano (Peruvian Aprista Party, PAP) and the Unión Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Union, UR) led by Luis Sánchez Cerro. It also brought a new political style to bear, what Robert Jansen refers to as ‘populist mobilisation’, by which politicians sought to mobilise those hitherto largely excluded from formal politics among the middle and working classes.
Indeed, the 1931 elections were quite remarkable in this respect. Both leading candidates returned to Peru only weeks before the voting took place in October: Sánchez Cerro arrived in Callao from exile on 2 July; Haya de la Torre ten days later, after eight years’ living abroad. Both went about organising new party structures virtually from scratch; in the event they took an expanded electorate by storm, rallying the voters to their respective standards and pushing establishment figures to the margins. Jansen argues forcefully that a new politics was born, albeit still on a limited suffrage.
But Revolutionizing Repertoires is more than just a book about an election, however remarkable. It brings together two key elements of the theoretical literature – that relating to the nature of Latin American populism and that of social movements, applying them to the specific circumstances of Peru in the first third of the twentieth century. Jensen contends that Peru paved the way for the classic manifestations of Latin American populism elsewhere, claiming that it was his interest in the vexed theme of populism that drew him to studying this period of Peruvian history in the first place. But what interests him more is the ability of populist politicians to mobilise adherents within an electoral framework and successfully change the game for future political contests. His analysis draws on those social movement theorists who focus on the conditions and contexts that favour political mobilisation of previously excluded social classes.
Jansen thus places his emphasis on what he calls political innovation, the ability of leaders to change the nature of political engagement, orchestrating and organising political mobilisations that alter previous styles of conducting politics and set new patterns for the future. To that end he traces the nature and evolution of elite-based politics through from the so-called Aristocratic Republic, beginning in the 1890s, to Leguía's 11-year quasi-dictatorship, known as El Oncenio (1919–30). The 1931 elections, he posits, broke the mould of the country's politics, setting it off in a new direction in which populism, or at least ‘populist rhetoric’ infused politics in ways that continue up to the present.
Jansen argues that the 1931 elections represent the first example of large-scale, election-oriented populist mobilisation, not only in Peru but in Latin America more broadly. Placing Peru as a forerunner of Latin American populism is, arguably, a rather overblown claim. One can think, for example, of the electoral events that set the Mexican Revolution off with Francisco Madero's electoral crusade against the regime of Porfirio Díaz. Indeed, the Mexican Revolution would appear to have a greater claim to be the genesis of Latin American populism than the 1931 elections in Peru.
It could also be argued that, by highlighting the significance of this particular electoral contest, Jansen minimises precursor events, such as the 1912 elections that gave rise to the Billinghurst government. President Guillermo Billinghurst sought to appeal to the Limeño working class at the time, who had been radicalised by a successful general strike the previous year. His government introduced reforms designed to ameliorate labour conditions in the capital city and elsewhere. Ultimately, he failed to last more than 18 months in office, having antagonised the still-powerful Peruvian oligarchs, their representatives in Congress, and the military which moved to depose him. Two decades before the 1931 elections, there were some clear signs of nascent ‘populist mobilisation’ in Peru.
By stressing organisational innovations, Jansen's thesis gives pride of place to the similarities between Haya de la Torre and Sánchez Cerro in the ways they mobilised their respective supporters in 1931, focusing on the activities of political clubs and public rallies and how these were instrumental in mobilising a much wider public. Less is said about the ideological differences between these two competing political figures: Sánchez Cerro's conservative nationalism tinged by fascist influences vs. the more progressive and reformist position adopted by Haya de la Torre and the PAP. While the PAP appealed to organised labour and the middle class, Sánchez Cerro sought to mobilise the unemployed and migrants to Lima around a much more ambiguous ideology. One of the problems about writing on populism is its focus on political style as opposed to policy stance, whether on the Right or the Left.
However, these points do not seriously detract from the value of this book, which will be of interest to a wide academic readership, not just those interested in Peruvian history. While focusing attention on a particularly interesting and important moment in Peru's political development, it raises much broader methodological issues.
In the end, Sánchez Cerro emerged triumphant from the 1931 elections, despite PAP members’ claims that they were victims of egregious fraud. This ushered in a new, more conflictual period in which, following Sánchez Cerro's assassination by a young Aprista in 1933, the army took up the cudgels against Peru's first mass-based political party, a feud that was to last nearly half a century until Haya's death in 1979. Ironically, the PAP's populist message in 1931, and the conspiratorial politics it was to pursue in the following years, prevented its initially progressive message from being translated into public policy. For that it had to await the populism of Alan García in the late 1980s, with disastrous results.
Of course, one of the great counterfactual questions is: what would have happened if the PAP had, indeed, won the 1931 elections, and how would its populist rhetoric have transformed into policy?
