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Peruvian President Dina Bolhuarte has introduced a bill to hold early presidential and parliamentary elections this year to calm the country's tense protests, after lawmakers in the highly fragmented Congress (parliament) were unable to reach an agreement on the issue for weeks because of political fights between them, reported Reuters.

In the text of the bill, with which Reuters was able to get acquainted, it is proposed that early presidential and parliamentary elections be held together in October this year, and that the newly elected head of state and the new composition of the parliament respectively take office at the end of December.

Their mandate will be five years, until July 2028.

The Andean country has been gripped by anti-government protests for nearly eight weeks, with 48 people killed in clashes between demonstrators and security forces, mostly in Peru's copper-rich southern regions.

One of the main demands of the protesters who took to the streets for the ouster of former leftist President Pedro Castillo was precisely that early elections be held an hour sooner.

The new bill was introduced after lawmakers in Congress previously rejected a series of proposals to schedule elections despite widespread public support for an early vote due to a lack of parliamentary consensus.

The most recent case was on Wednesday, when after days of debates behind closed doors, the people's representatives once again failed to reach an agreement on the issue.

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The reason for this deadlock is that the political parties in the fragmented Congress are deeply divided over which path Peru should take.

Some representatives of the right, for example, do not want their mandates to be terminated early, while left-wing parties have announced that they will not support any election bill if it does not include the production of a non-binding referendum on the drafting of a new constitution.