By JUAN FORERO
 
CARACAS, Venezuela, Aug. 4 - With his popularity already near rock bottom, President Alejandro Toledo of Peru is embroiled in a corruption scandal so debilitating that a recent opinion poll indicated that half of Peruvians believed he would not finish out the remaining two years of his five-year term.

The press and political analysts in Peru increasingly say Mr. Toledo may be critically weakened. In the face of the new scandal, which involves accusations that the president took a $5 million bribe, his approval rating plummeted to 8 percent in one poll - the lowest of any president in a region of unpopular leaders - before rising to 13 percent last weekend.

Mr. Toledo's party lost its leadership of Congress after an opposition lawmaker, Antero Flores, was chosen on July 26 to head the single-chamber legislature. The change could give Mr. Toledo's adversaries a more solid stage from which to remove him as president, as some of his critics in Congress have threatened.

Mr. Toledo, a onetime shoeshine boy, began his presidency as a reformer who many Peruvians believed would clean up a country battered by the 10-year, graft-ridden rule of Alberto K. Fujimori.

But within months he was plagued by a series of personal scandals - from revelations about extravagant spending to a daughter born out of wedlock - that provided ample fodder for a press still controlled by allies of the former president.

Peruvians have become increasingly restless, using nearly unrelenting street protests to show their disappointment with the government's inability to improve their lives even as the economy steadily chalked up strong growth applauded by international lenders and Wall Street.

Now, some analysts are saying, a final straw may be the fresh torrent of criticism directed at the president.

It began two weeks ago when a leading magazine, Caretas, reported that a former aide, César Almeyda, who is in jail on corruption charges, said Mr. Toledo had taken a $5 million bribe to favor a Colombian brewer in its purchase of a Peruvian beer maker. His claims followed allegations that Mr. Toledo's party forged signatures to register for the 2000 election, which Mr. Fujimori stole.

Mr. Toledo, 58, has energetically denied all of the allegations, and no hard proof has been presented against him. But opinion polls show that most Peruvians do not believe him and instead see their president as incapable and deceitful.

His problems do not end there.

Mr. Toledo's wife, Eliane Karp, who was born in Belgium and who has a popularity rating lower than the president's, is accused of placing money from her consulting work in a bank account in Panama. Opposition leaders wonder why the account was in the name of Mr. Almeyda, the aide who Caretas said had accused Mr. Toledo of taking the bribe.

Ms. Karp, like her husband, has worked for the World Bank, and the Peruvian authorities are investigating whether she misused money from a World Bank loan, possibly to help finance the salaries of friends. She has not commented on the investigation, but the president offered to open her personal bank accounts to public scrutiny to show that there had been no wrongdoing.

The scandals, though limited compared with the widespread crimes and abuses of the Fujimori era, have been particularly damaging because they mirror some of the corruption that many thought Mr. Toledo would correct. Mr. Fujimori's administration was rife with bribe-taking, prosecutors in Lima charge, and his use of fraudulent signatures in the 2000 election helped lead to his downfall when Congress voted him unfit to govern.

"It's the same racket and the same kind of people, moving more or less the same kind of business," said Mirko Lauer, a respected political columnist at La República, a Lima newspaper.

Mr. Toledo won some ground when, in his state of the nation address on July 28, he pledged to open his own bank accounts to public disclosure and said he would support reforms to Peru's Constitution. But the gain may be short-lived, and he remains vulnerable, analysts say.

"The risks that the government had remain," said Augusto Álvarez, a political commentator and editor of the newspaper Perú 21. "The risk is that things will go out of control if something else comes up."

He also urged other politicians to join him in disclosing their bank records and reeled off accomplishments from cheap housing programs to 35 straight months of economic growth.

"If these are tangible and real achievements, why the dissatisfaction, political noise and growing frustration is some sectors of the population?" he asked.

The major beneficiary of Mr. Toledo's troubles is Alan García, the runner-up in the 2001 election. During his presidency, from 1985 to 1990, corruption reached new heights and the economy floundered under hyperinflation, but he now casts himself as a remade reformer.

In a recent trip to the United States, he assured Wall Street analysts and those attending a forum at the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington, that he was not the same president who stopped payments on Peru's foreign debt. "He gave no sense of the old García," said Michael Shifter, a senior policy analyst at the group.

Some things do tilt toward Mr. Toledo, analysts say.

Mr. García, like many Peruvian politicians, is still seen by many Peruvians as part of the old political class that plundered the country. There is a dearth respected, rival politicians, and losing the leadership in Congress may help him share the blame for Peru's troubles with other parties.

Then there is the possibility that Peruvians may not want the uncertainty that is likely if the president is thrown out before his term ends, especially so soon after the end of Mr. Fujimori's rule in 2000.

Mr. Toledo won the presidency in 2001, a year after an interim government took over from Mr. Fujimori. Mr. Fujimori is now in exile in Japan, his ancestral homeland, avoiding charges of directing death squads and corruption.