After 19 years, right leads research for presidency in Bolivia

With the former president praying or vote Nulo, a It arrives at the general elections of August 17 with the left divided and the right leading the polls. Mega businessman Samuel Medina appears as a favorite and former Cocalem leader and Senate President Andronics Rodriguez, former ally of Evo, has not reached the two digits in the polls. In addition to president and vice, the country elects 130 deputies and 36 senators. With about 12 million people, the Andean nation borders Acre, Rondônia, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul.

The crack in the movement to socialism (MAS)-a party that leads the country since 2006-can consolidate the end of the left-wing country cycle in the South American country that has lasted 19 years. The exception was the government of Jeanine Añez, who took over the presidency from 2019 to 2020 after a military coup that led to Evo’s resignation after accusations of electoral fraud. In November 2020, MAS returned to power through the ballot box by choosing, with 55% of the votes, candidate Luis Arce, former Minister of Economy of Evo. Upon returning from exile, however, Morales cracks with Arce and a part of the MAS, faithful to him, becomes opposition to the government.

Prevented from running by the Electoral Court for already governed the country for three terms, Evo Morales began to defend the null vote and attack former allies, denouncing that it suffers political persecution while responding to a minor rape, which he denies. In June this year, highway blocks in favor of Evo’s candidacy stopped part of the country for 15 days with a balance of at least four dead.

RECORD LEFT

Amid the clashes with Evo and in the face of the low evaluation of his government influenced, among other reasons, for a persistent economic crisis, President Luiz Arce gave up on running for reelection. In place, Arce indicated for the former Minister Eduardo de Castillo, who bitter about 2% in polls of voting intentions. Arce’s choice was also questioned by party base movements. Evo’s former ally and current president of the Senate, Andronics Rodríguez, appointed as a possible left alternative to Bolivian presidency, has been melting in the polls in recent weeks. He fell from a third place with about 14% of voting intentions to about 6%, according to UNITEL survey.

Former Cocalem leader of the same region of Evo Morales, Andronics left the MAS to apply, joining the Alianza Popular Party. Since announced the candidacy, andron has been attacked by Evo as a “traitor.” Another left figure that entered the dispute was Eva Cup, which was from MAS, but left the caption and created the brunette party this year to apply. She was president of the Senate for the but during the government of the directionist Añez. He is currently mayor of the important city El Alto.

However, at the end of July, Eva gave up the campaign claiming that the party was not yet mature nationally to run for the presidency. The sociology professor at the Federal University of Ceará (UFC), Clayton Mendonça Cunha Filho, told Agência Brasil that Evo’s insistence on putting himself as the only possible candidate of but imploding the party that, from 2009 to 2019, had a qualified two -thirds majority in Parliament.

“In the ambition of being the eternal candidate, Evo Morales imploded the party. But it is a caption that basically is a great grouping of many trends, Marxist groups, unions, indigenous people and everything. It is very heterogeneous. What happened is that Evo Morales imploded this large front,” he said. Also according to the expert, such as Bolivia’s electoral system is on a proportional closed list linked to the presidential candidate’s vote, but the risk of becoming a minority in Parliament, unless strong local candidates can avoid greater loss.

“The largest and, in many ways, the sole party with effective social ties and truly national from Bolivia in the last two decades, is in serious danger of literally disappearing if it does not reach the prevailing barrier clause of 3% of national votes and Evo Morales’ exacerbated personalism,” Clayton wrote to the South American Political Observatory.

Right -wing

In this scenario of fragmentation of the Bolivian left, the right has been leading the polls of voting intentions with Samuel Medina (Alianza Unidad) and Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga (Alianza Libertad y Democracy) in the first places. Together, the two right -wing candidates would have about 47% of the votes, says a survey by the newspaper El Deber, published on Sunday (3). To win in the first round, the candidate needs 50% of the votes plus one, or 40% of the votes and a distance of 10 percentage points of the second candidate. If the surveys are confirmed, there will be an unprecedented second round in Bolivia, scheduled for October 19.

UFC professor Clayton Mendonça Cunha Filho explained that these two candidates are from a traditional right, not being an extreme right. Samuel Medina, who has appeared ahead in the polls, for example, is a mega Bolivian businessman who has been a candidate for presidency twice, second in the 2014 election. Medina was also a minister of state in the 1990s, responsible for one of the first privatization waves in Bolivia, having started his political career in center-left organizations until walking, for time, for right center.

Already the ‘tuto’ is another traditional politician of 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 but won it, Tuto Quiroga was in 2nd place, losing to Evo. Quiroga reached the presidency of the country in 2001-2002 after the resignation, due to health problems, by President Hugo Banzer. In 2019, in the interim government of Añez, Quiroga was appointed international spokesman for the country.

Plurinational state

The political movement that led to MA to power is part of what some researchers call Latin America’s “pink tide”, which would be a wave of left or progressive governments that came to power on the continent over the first decade of the 2000s, with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Lula in Brazil, Evo in Bolivia, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina and Rafael Correia in the Ecuador. In the cases of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, new constitutions were promulgated. With Evo Morales, Bolivia approved in 2009 a new constitutional model based on the plurinationality of the various indigenous ethnicities that make up the Bolivian people.

For Professor Cunha Filho, this new institutionality must undergo a critical test with the arrival of a right -wing government. However, as the scenario is of political fragmentation, the expert evaluates that the new government should not be able to alter the institutionality of the 2009 Constitution, as it must need to compose 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 try to modify this institutional arrangement? Being optimistic, it can be a consolidation of this model. You stop identifying this state format with a government project, as many people sometimes treat, as if it were a model just but,” he commented to Agência Brasil.

*With information from Agência Brasil