Left pays the price in Bolivia

It’s been a pretty lean month for elections, but Sunday saw Bolivia go to the polls to elect a new president – after incumbent Luis Arce chose not to seek re-election – plus both houses of the legislature. And it was no surprise that the Bolivian left, dominant for the last two decades, paid the price for its recent disunity.

We’ve covered earlier instalments of the Bolivian story in recent years: see here, here and here for examples. Briefly, left-wing president Evo Morales, first elected in 2005, tried to run for a fourth term with dubious legality in 2019, but was forced to resign by public protests. Arce, his ally, then won the subsequent election, but the two fell out over control of their party, the Movement for Socialism (MAS).

Morales eventually resigned from the party and the courts blocked his attempt to run for president under another banner. He is also wanted on charges of sex with underage women, although local support in his home region of Chapare has prevented his arrest. MAS chose Eduardo Del Castillo, a minister in Arce’s government, as its candidate, but Senate president Andrónico Rodríguez, who had been closer to Morales, left the party to run against him. Morales refused to endorse either of them, calling on his supporters to cast blank ballots.

In the face of this internal conflict and of Arce’s inability to solve the country’s economic woes, the left’s vote collapsed. On preliminary figures, Del Castillo could manage only 3.2%; Rodríguez did a bit better, in fourth place with 8.2%; and 19.1% followed Morales’s advice and voted informal. On the partial official count, which as of this afternoon shows 60.1% reporting, those numbers are 3.1%, 7.4% and 16.8% respectively.* Either way, compared with Arce’s 55.1% in 2020 it’s a huge comedown.

Instead voters swung massively to the right, although not quite as expected. Cement tycoon Samuel Doria Medina, making his fourth run for the presidency, had led in most of the opinion polls, but could only manage 19.6% (that’s on the preliminary count; 21.0% so far on the partial count) to finish in third place. Well in the lead is Christian Democrat Rodrigo Paz, son of a former president, on 31.7% (30.7% partial), followed by another right-winger, Jorge Quiroga, who was briefly president in 2001-02, on 27.2% (28.8% partial).

Paz and Quiroga will contest the runoff in two months time, on 19 October. The ground sometimes shifts in that time, but at present Paz must be a strong favorite: Doria Medina has endorsed him, and the left-wing vote should mostly flow to him as the more centrist candidate. All three of the right-of-centre candidates promised free-market reforms to overhaul the economy, but Quiroga had more explicitly endorsed the sort of radical policies implemented (so far with great success) by Javier Milei in neighboring Argentina.

Morales deserves credit at least for the fact that Bolivian democracy has survived. Although he bent the rules, he did not establish a dictatorship like his comrades in Nicaragua and Venezuela. Now his party needs to move on and learn some lessons from its electoral repudiation.

UPDATE, Wednesday afternoon: The partial count is now up to 70.1%, and as you would expect it’s converging closer to the preliminary count. Paz is on 31.4%, followed by Quiroga 27.3%, Doria Medina 20.5% and Rodríguez 8.0%.

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* You can’t just add the three numbers together, because the informal vote is a percentage of the total but the others are percentages of the formal vote. As a percentage of the total vote, the notional left vote (counting the informals) would be between 25% and 29%, but some may have voted informal for other reasons. The official results are here, but Firefox won’t load them for me so I’m mostly relying on the Spanish-language Wikipedia, supplemented by media reports.