Bolivia: Right-wing leads presidential polls after 19 years.

Lucas Pordeus León, reporter for Agência Brasil - With former president Evo Morales advocating for a null vote, Bolivia heads into the general elections on August 17th with the left divided and the right leading in the polls.

Mega-businessman Samuel Medina appears to be the favorite, while former coca growers' leader and Senate president Andrónico Rodriguez, a former ally of Evo Morales, has not reached double digits in the polls. 

In addition to the president and vice president, the country elects 130 deputies and 36 senators. With approximately 12 million people, the Andean nation borders the states of Acre, Rondônia, Mato Grosso, and Mato Grosso do Sul.

The split in the Movement for Socialism (MAS) – the party that has led the country since 2006 – could solidify the end of the 19-year cycle of left-wing governments in the South American nation. 

The exception was the government of Jeanine Áñez, who assumed the presidency from 2019 to 2020 after a military coup that led to Evo's resignation following accusations of electoral fraud.

In November 2020, the MAS returned to power through elections, winning 55% of the vote and electing Luis Arce, Evo Morales' former Minister of Economy.

Upon returning from exile, however, Morales broke with Arce, and a faction of the MAS, loyal to him, turned into opposition to the government.

Barred from running for office by the electoral court because he had already governed the country for three terms, Evo Morales began advocating for null votes and attacking former allies, claiming he is suffering political persecution while facing charges of raping a minor, which he denies.

In June of this year, highway blockades in support of Evo's candidacy paralyzed parts of the country for 15 days, resulting in at least four deaths.

Cracked left

Amid clashes with Evo Morales and facing low approval ratings for his government, influenced, among other reasons, by a persistent economic crisis, President Luis Arce decided not to run for re-election.

Instead, Arce nominated his former minister Eduardo De Castillo for the MAS party, who is polling at around 2%. Arce's choice has also been questioned by grassroots movements within the party.

Evo's former ally and current Senate president, Andrónico Rodríguez, seen as a possible left-wing alternative for the Bolivian presidency, has been plummeting in the polls in recent weeks.

He dropped from third place with about 14% of voting intentions to about 6%, according to a Unitel poll.

Andrónico, a former coca growers' leader from the same region as Evo Morales, left the MAS party to run for office, joining the Alianza Popular party. Since announcing his candidacy, Andrónico has been attacked by Evo as a "traitor."

Another figure from the left who entered the race was Eva Copa, who was with the MAS party but left it and created the Morena party this year in order to run for office. She was president of the Senate for the MAS during the government of the right-wing Áñez. Currently, she is the mayor of the important city of El Alto.

However, at the end of July, Eva dropped out of the campaign, claiming that the party was not yet mature enough nationally to compete for the presidency.

Clayton Mendonça Cunha Filho, a sociology professor at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), told Agência Brasil that Evo's insistence on positioning himself as the only possible candidate for the MAS party ended up imploding the party, which, from 2009 to 2019, held a qualified two-thirds majority in Parliament.

“In his ambition to be the eternal candidate, Evo Morales imploded the party. The MAS is a party that is basically a large grouping of many tendencies, from Marxist groups, unions, indigenous rights activists, and everything else. It is very heterogeneous. What happened is that Evo Morales imploded this broad front,” he emphasized.

According to the expert, since Bolivia's electoral system is a closed-list proportional representation system tied to the presidential candidate's vote, the MAS party risks becoming a minority in parliament, unless strong local candidates manage to prevent a greater loss.

“The largest and, in many ways, the only party with effective social ties and a truly national identity in Bolivia over the last two decades, runs the serious risk of literally disappearing if it does not reach the current threshold of 3% of the national vote, demolished by internal leadership disputes and the exacerbated personalism of Evo Morales,” Clayton wrote for the South American Political Observatory.

Right wing leading  

In this scenario of fragmentation of the Bolivian left, the right has been leading in the polls, with Samuel Medina (Alianza Unidad) and Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga (Alianza Libertad y Democracia) in the top spots. Combined, the two right-wing candidates would have approximately 47% of the vote, according to a poll by the newspaper... Duty, published this Sunday (3).

To win in the first round, a candidate needs 50% of the votes plus one, or 40% of the votes and a 10 percentage point lead over the second-place candidate. If the polls are correct, there will be an unprecedented second round in Bolivia, scheduled for October 19.  

UFC professor Clayton Mendonça Cunha Filho explained that these two candidates belong to the traditional right wing, not to the extreme right.

Samuel Medina, who has been leading in the polls, for example, is a Bolivian mega-businessman who has already run for president twice, finishing second in the 2014 election.

Medina also served as a Minister of State in the 1990s, responsible for one of the first waves of privatization in Bolivia. He began his political career in center-left organizations before eventually moving to the center-right.

'Tuto' Quiroga is another traditional politician from the Bolivian right. He was Minister of Finance in 1992 and elected Vice President of Bolivia in 1997. In 2005, in the first election that MAS won, Tuto Quiroga came in second place, losing to Evo.

Quiroga became president of the country in 2001-2002 after the resignation, due to health problems, of President Hugo Banzer. In 2019, during the interim government of Áñez, Quiroga was appointed the country's international spokesperson.

multinational state

The political movement that brought MAS to power is part of what some researchers call the "pink tide" of Latin America, which is a wave of left-wing or progressive governments that came to power on the continent during the first decade of the 2000s, including Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador.

In the cases of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, new constitutions were enacted. Under Evo Morales, Bolivia approved a new constitutional model in 2009 based on the plurinationality of the diverse indigenous ethnicities that make up the Bolivian people.

According to Professor Cunha Filho, this new institutional framework must undergo a critical test with the arrival of a right-wing government.

However, given the current political fragmentation, the expert believes that the new government will likely be unable to alter the institutional framework of the 2009 Constitution, as it will probably need to form alliances with other political forces to govern.  

“It will be the first time that a president elected under this new model of the Plurinational State will not have participated in the construction of this State. What will they try to change about this institutional arrangement? Optimistically, it could be a consolidation of this model. You stop identifying this State format with a government project, as many people sometimes do, as if it were a model only of the MAS,” he commented to Agência Brasil.