This is the question that Conscious Capitalism Peru poses to the young people participating in the Conscious Young Citizens workshop in different regions of the country. And the answers, regardless of the place, are repeated. The youth want to live in a country with security, real access to quality education and health. Where women are not afraid to walk down a dark street or get into a taxi. Where they have economic opportunities and are not discriminated against because of their race or place of origin. They want a country where there is no corruption, hitmen, illegal mining, or drug trafficking. They want to live in democracy, with freedom and dignity.
But to achieve that country, politics matters, a lot. For a long time, we believed that the economy ran on a separate track from politics. And that it was not necessary to concern ourselves with political issues because the country was growing, our companies were making a lot of money, and poverty was decreasing.
We forgot that the economy grew because we designed appropriate economic institutions; however, despite our growth, we did not manage to reduce informality or increase the productivity of our workers. We also forgot that there were pending reforms necessary to achieve development.
When in 2021 we chose Pedro Castillo to lead the country’s destiny, we did not measure the consequences. Over the last five years, the country has regressed. The gap in educational infrastructure, instead of narrowing, widened. 48% of public schools must be demolished and only 22% of rural public schools have access to the three basic services; this is four percentage points below the 2015 level. But it is not just infrastructure. By the end of 2025, 20% of public school computers were inoperative, much more than the 12% in 2019 (IPE). And despite a 40% increase in spending per student since 2019, learning outcomes have not improved. In fact, today fewer public school students in the second year of secondary school understand what they read.
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Peru, as we have repeated many times in this column, is not a poor country, it is an upper-middle-income country, and one of the highest public investors in Latin America. In 2025, Peru exceeded S/60 billion in public investment and yet we did not manage to reduce the gap in access to basic services. In 2019, 47% of households received properly chlorinated water; by the end of 2025 it is 38%. And only 51% of households have water 24 hours a day. Six percentage points below 2020 (57%).
The state’s limited public management capacity directly impacts Peruvians’ dissatisfaction with the state itself and the political class, which often leads them to vote for anti-system candidates like Castillo. The problem is that these anti-system candidates tend to be poor governors because they lack public management knowledge and do not have technical teams to compensate for their deficiencies. Moreover, the platform from which they run forces them to propose populist reforms that deepen problems and further weaken institutions, scare away private investment, increase poverty, and consequently, citizens’ dissatisfaction.
Much is at stake, and the decision you make this Sunday the 7th will have a direct impact on our quality of life in the coming years. Now the question is for you: in what country would you like to live?
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