Peru’s April 2001 general elections—the country’s first elections that were considered to be free and fair by all political forces after Alberto Fujimori’s decade in power—positioned its oldest party, APRA, as the first opposition force in the legislature. APRA’s candidate narrowly lost a presidential “run-off” (a second round election) held in June, obtaining more than 5 million votes, about 30 times the party’s vote share only a year earlier. Seven months after returning from an eight-year exile, party leader and former president Alan García seized the opportunity to propose a challenge to his fellow partisans—internal party reform for keeping that support: “The great challenge facing the party is to keep its relationship with this huge citizen force, because APRA’s social support depends on it (...) We must be aware that only a modern and open social message can help maintain a favourable attitude among Peruvians toward the party. Otherwise, the party’s electoral support or acceptance could be reduced again. (...) This is the first step in the modernization and re-launch of APRA to society” (Letter to the Comrades, 23 July 2001).

Ever since its foundation in 1930, the party had functioned with an early 20th century trade-union organizational structure: cells, committees and secretariats with functions dealing with discipline, organization, culture, ethics, treasury, etc. The inward-looking set-up was appropriate during periods of underground activity, yet under democracy, citizens became less attached to ideologies and classical political mobilization and showed low trust in political parties. Thus the party needed to open up and reach out to the citizenry in a different way. The party leadership therefore tried to place its strategic planning process in the wider context of Peruvian democratic developments.

The call for modernization set off a review process of the party’s structure, led by the Secretariat of Organization, which involved a nationwide discussion of different options and ideas: seven regional assemblies gathered about 1,500 national and subnational leaders who had previously consulted the party’s grass roots. The Secretariat distilled discussions into a set of recommendations. The process concluded that the party’s set-up had become bureaucratic, vertical and top-down, centralized and obsolete. It proposed a new structure that was organized along three different dimensions of the party’s life:

1. institutional dimension, to deal with internal matters;

2. social dimension, to interact with groups of society without formally incorporating them; and

3. governmental dimension, to permanently keep track of government activity and update plans and programmes.

The recommendations were translated into a proposal for a new party constitution that was then approved by the 55th party plenary in September 2003 and finally the 22nd national congress in June 2004. The social and governmental dimensions were the new elements, and their heads would be part of the top decision-making body: the National Executive Committee.

The new social dimension encompassed five direc¬torates: women, professionals, workers, CSOs and popular organizations. The state dimension consists of 17 directorates that mirror nearly all cabinet posts— similar to a shadow cabinet.
The new party constitution also created a permanent National Commission for Strategic Planning with a mandate to provide the national leadership with stra¬tegic ad- vice. This demonstrated that APRA considered strategic planning to be a permanent task of the party rather than a one-off.

Source: Strategic Planning for Political Parties – a Practical Tool