Bolivia elects president and Evo Morales’ candidate leads the polls

Almost a year after coup that evicted Evo Morales power, Bolivia will elect a new president this Sunday, at a time when it is going through the deepest economic crisis in 40 years, with a forecast contraction of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 6.2% in 2020.

The candidate of the Movement to Socialism (MAS), Luis Arce, leads all the polls, seconded by former president Carlos Mesa. The big question points to whether there will be a victory in the first round or a second electoral round on November 29.

With a relationship of forces similar to that of the elections a year ago, in which Evo Morales proclaimed victory but the rest of the groups denounced fraud, Arce closes his electoral campaign, a day after his center-right rival called ” definitively defeat “the socialist project of Morales.

Both are the only ones with options to become heads of state, according to the polls. According to the latest Ipsos poll, the MAS candidate has a 42% intention to vote, while his rival reaps 34% support. The Constitution declares the winner in the first round the candidate who obtains an absolute majority or 40% of the votes with a 10-point advantage over the second.

Mesa, who ruled in 2003-2005, closed his campaign Tuesday night in the eastern city of Santa Cruz, head of the richest region in Bolivia, where he called on his compatriots to vote for him to prevent the MAS of Morales and Arce from returning. to the power. “Let it be clear, no one is wrong, because we are the only ones who can definitely defeat Morales and Arce, because Arce is nothing other than Morales, and Morales ‘never in the life’ (never again in life) ”, declared Mesa before hundreds of followers of his party, Comunidad Ciudadana.

Mesa closed his campaign in Santa Cruz, rather than La Paz, in an apparent attempt to take votes from the right-wing Luis Fernando Camacho, leader of a local civic committee and who gained notoriety a year ago in the protests that led to the departure of Morales from power and the country, first asylum in Mexico and then in Argentina.

Bolivia: a coup d’état that besieges the region’s democracies

The campaign was marked by the polarization between Morales supporters and detractors, who affirms that Arce, his former Minister of Economy, is “a guarantee of stability, economic growth and redistribution of wealth.” Arce, 57, raises the flag of economic bonanza and poverty reduction during the Morales government, achievements that he attributes to the nationalization of hydrocarbons in 2006. The next president will face a complicated economic scenario due to the fall of the exports and the crisis derived from the pandemic.

His supporters denounced that there could be fraud this weekend. “In the next elections the validity of the Plurinational State is at stake,” said the former Minister of Health, Nila Heredia, in an event organized by the Argentine Network of Professionals for Foreign Policy (Redappe). With respect to a possible fraud, the former ambassador Fernando Rodríguez Ureña, “there are indications because, for many months, the electoral body has been changing software and technicians are being trained.”

Four international observation missions will monitor the transparency of the elections. “We have made a general call for the results to be respected,” declared Francisco Guerrero, from the mission of the Organization of American States (OAS), after a courtesy visit to the de facto president Jeanine Áñez. The other missions are from the European Union, the Carter Center and the Association of Electoral Bodies of America. The elections will also renew the entire Bolivian Congress, controlled by the MAS.

LD/MC