Nearly two decades of indigenous-led leftist hegemony over Bolivian politics came to a crashing end on Sunday as the ruling Movement Towards Socialism party was handed a humiliating defeat in presidential elections.
The movement (known as the MAS after its initials in Spanish) exploded on to the country’s political scene in 2002 and ruled the Andean nation for all but one of the last 19 years.
In power it reshaped Bolivia’s institutions to better serve its indigenous peasant majority. But on Sunday it was reduced to a rump after a fratricidal three years of internal struggles amid the collapse of its economic model.
Fed-up voters abandoned the movement as they veered sharply right with the official MAS candidate taking just 3 per cent of the vote, a humiliating implosion from the 55 per cent the party won last time in 2020.
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Almost 22 per cent of ballots were blank or spoiled, up from just 5 per cent in the last election, indicating many voters, particularly in rural indigenous regions, heeded the call for a boycott by former MAS president Evo Morales.
He was barred from seeking an unprecedented fourth term by the courts after his violent falling out with his one-time ally, outgoing president Luis Arce.
[ Tom Hennigan: Crises and fear grip BoliviaOpens in new window ]
The best placed leftist was former MAS senator Andrónico Rodríguez on 8 per cent of the poll, coming in a distant fourth. He was greeted with a hail of stones from supporters of Morales furious at his refusal to join the boycott when going to cast his vote on Sunday.
Morales is holed up in his political base in the cocaine-producing Chapare region. Surrounded by armed supporters, he has vowed not to recognise the result. He is also facing charges that he fathered a child with an underage girl when president, something he denies, saying he is the victim of a witch-hunt.
The infighting on the left cleared the path for the return of the right to power as two of its candidates advanced to a run-off round to be held on October 19th.
The surprise of the night was Christian Democrat senator Rodrigo Paz who came first with 32 per cent. Bolivia’s notoriously unreliable opinion polls had barely registered his campaign. “We are the voice of those who didn’t appear in the polls, of those who had no voice, the voice of a Bolivia that never had a voice and now has a voice,” he told jubilant supporters in his victory speech.
Paz’s running mate Edmand Lara, a former police officer-turned-TikTok personality popular for his videos denouncing corruption among his former colleagues, is credited with helping drive Paz to the front of the race.
The son of a former president, Paz will now face off against another former head of state and government, Jorge Quiroga, who came second with 27 per cent of the vote as Bolivia’s old political elite – which had appeared dead during much of the last two decades of MAS domination – staged an unlikely comeback.
In elections for the new legislature the broader left looked unlikely to secure a single seat in the powerful senate while the MAS looks set to be excluded from the lower house that will contain just a handful of left-wing members.
The return of the right to power in Bolivia follows a similar ideological turn in the region with the victory of Javier Milei in Argentina and Daniel Noboa in Ecuador, with Pinochet admirer José Antonio Kast well-positioned in advance of Chile’s presidential contest later this year.
The winner of October’s run-off in Bolivia will be charged with rescuing an economy in structural crisis.
The MAS had used the money from gas exports to Argentina and Brazil to pay for social programmes that eased poverty in one of Latin America’s poorest nations.
But the decision to nationalise the gas sector in 2006 and subsequent state mismanagement starved it of investment, leading to declining production and a collapse in export revenues.
Rescuing it with the exploration and development of new reserves will take at least five to seven years, says the country’s former hydrocarbons minister Mauricio Medinaceli. “What we are dealing with here is a long-term crisis,” he says.
The lack of gas exports means Bolivia is now chronically short of the dollars necessary to pay for essential imports. There are growing concerns about domestic food production as farmers struggle to buy inputs such as fertilisers.
The state is also heading for a default on its debts as continues to bankroll generous subsides on fuel and food that it can no longer afford but dares not withdraw for fear of popular protests that in the past have turned violent.
With the MAS’s elimination, how radically the next president should tackle the crisis he will inherit is set to dominate the rest of the campaign.
“Bolivia has to raise prices, but we need a blended policy where this is done with social programmes to help people,” former minister Medinaceli says. “You don’t want to implement economic policy without any care for the social aspect.”
