Collapse of the Bolivian left
This is the result of an overwhelming majority of the population, who have largely divided their votes between a Spanish-Bolivian born in Santiago de Compostela in 1967, Rodrigo Paz Pereira, of the Christian Democratic Party, and former president Jorge ‘Tuto’ Quiroga, representative of the Free Alliance. They won 58% of the votes cast in the first round and will be the finalists in the second round in October.
The candidates on the left, both the ruling party's Eduardo del Castillo (3%) and Senate President Andrónico Rodríguez (8.8%), barely managed to secure one in ten votes between them, reducing the Movement for Socialism (MAS) to symbolic parliamentary representation.
As soon as the first results endorsed by the Electoral Commission were known, the settling of scores began within the left, with former President Evo Morales accusing all those who prevented him from running again of being ‘traitors,’ from President Luis Arce to the now defeated candidates, including the Supreme Court justices who ruled that the Constitution prevents more than two presidential terms. Morales served four consecutive terms and aspired to change the fundamental law to remain in power indefinitely, in line with the left-wing Grupo de Puebla, in which both the former Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and the current Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who also holds the presidency of the Socialist International, have a presence and a more active role. However, former social democratic parties have broken away from the Socialist International and are now reduced to a mere memory of their past splendour.
Evo Morales, who advocated a null vote in these elections, claims through his spokespeople that he still wields considerable influence, arguing that 19% of null votes actually give him third place in the electoral count and that, had he been the candidate, he would have won an ‘undisputed first place’.
Leaving aside these speculations about what might have happened and did not, the reality is that Morales' past policies have had a lot to do with the collapse of the Bolivian left. It was he who accelerated the economic model based on massive gas extraction and exportation in order to reduce poverty in the country from 60% to 36%. At the same time, massive agricultural industrialisation seriously altered deforestation and the balance between the land and the indigenous population. The results have been devastating: year-on-year inflation has shot up to 25%; massive gas extraction has failed to reverse the decline in export revenues from $5.5 billion in 2014 to just over $1.6 billion; there are fuel, food and medicine shortages throughout the country, which has seen a resurgence of strikes and massive road and communication blockades, largely fuelled by Morales himself.
As a result, fed up with these shortages, Bolivians have turned to a surprise candidate, Rodrigo Paz, who was polling at just 8% in the polls. His political project, outlined on election night, focuses on ‘reconciliation of the homeland’ and boosting the country's battered production levels, all through a liberalisation of Bolivia summed up in the slogan ‘Capitalism for All’. He has rejected a possible agreement with the IMF in order to ‘give Bolivians a chance to shape their own destiny’ and aspires to rejoin the group of nations that do not want to follow Cuba and Venezuela into the abyss.
Unless he is overtaken in the second round by the candidate of the centre-right Alianza Libre, Jorge ‘Tuto’ Quiroga, who was already president in 2001-2002, completing the term that Hugo Banzer was unable to finish, the Galician Rodrigo Paz will be the next president. However, if Quiroga wins, he also wants to break alliances with Cuba and Venezuela, and perhaps undertake the privatisation and free enterprise plan that he was unable to carry out during his brief two-year term, succeeding Banzer, and which he was unable to revalidate at the time.
In any case, these Bolivian elections accelerate the trend towards removing the left from power in Latin America, especially after Milei's victory in Argentina. Chile will be the next major electoral event, where Boric has not lived up to the expectations raised by his victory. However, the left-wing bloc still has two of the continent's most populous nations, Mexico and Brazil, with Petro's Colombia strengthening this conglomerate.