LIMA (Reuters) - Peru's centrist President Martin Vizcarra will unveil a new cabinet on Thursday as a dramatic challenge to his leadership by dozens of dismissed lawmakers earlier this week appeared to fizzle out.
No public institution or foreign power has backed the right-wing opposition's charge that Vizcarra illegally dissolved Congress on Monday by invoking a nuclear option in the constitution that also forced him to replace his cabinet.
At a ceremony at the presidential palace, Vizcarra will swear in 19 ministers, including Harvard-trained public administrator Maria Antonieta Alva as the new finance minister, two sources who asked not to be named told Reuters.
It was the latest sign that Peru, the world's No.2 copper producer and one of Latin America's most open economies, was moving on from its worst political crisis in two decades, with dismissed lawmakers' cries of "coup" fading from headlines in local media.
Peru's electoral authority said it was organizing new legislative elections for Jan. 26, a timeline proposed by Vizcarra that the Organization of American States called "a constructive step" toward overcoming the crisis.
Police have largely lifted a lockdown on streets in downtown Lima, where thousands of Vizcarra's supporters rallied to demand former lawmakers physically leave Congress earlier this week.
Former lawmakers who refuse to recognize Vizcarra as president have said they will ask the country's top court, the Constitutional Tribunal, to intervene. But their critics warn they could face criminal charges for continuing to insist they are still lawmakers.
The opposition's attempt earlier this week to anoint Vice President Mercedes Araoz as interim president fell apart after Vizcarra supporters charged her with usurpation of functions and the military and police reaffirmed their loyalty to Vizcarra.
Vizcarra said his decision to dissolve Congress and call for new legislative elections was a constitutional and necessary way to end a year-long stand-off with the opposition over his proposed reforms for stamping out entrenched graft.
He blamed the majority opposition party Popular Force, led by jailed former presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, of trying to use democratic institutions to shield their members and allies from criminal probes.
The opposition says Vizcarra has fanned widespread outrage over back-to-back graft scandals in recent years in order to orchestrate an unconstitutional power grab.
Vizcarra has not yet commented publicly on defiant lawmakers as he has focused on reshuffling his cabinet.
On the eve of the swearing-in ceremony, new Prime Minister Vicente Zeballos said the cabinet would continue to preserve the country's decades-old free-market economic model.
