Elections in Bolivia: the MAS still unable to conquer …

Pending slow official review, preliminary figures from Sunday’s regional elections in Bolivia show that The Movement for Socialism (MAS) still fails to convince voters in the cities of Santa Cruz, La Paz and Cochabamba. He also lost again in El Alto, considered one of his strongholds. Private screenings indicate that the ruling party would secure a victory in the first round of governors’ elections in three departments and that he should go to the second round with different opposing forces in four more. For that, part of the party leadership has already started to ask for a stage of “reflection” inside.

Within the opposition, only the far right, we think, would comfortably win the post of governor of Santa Cruz from the hands of Luis Fernando Camacho, and the new organization Movimiento Tercer Sistema, made up of dissidents of masism, is said to have won in the department of Beni, where former interim president Jeanine Áñez appears third.

So far, the only databases are the exit door and the quick count carried out by the consulting firms Ciesmori and Focaliza. Calculations in each of the nine departments had increased 8 to 15 percent at the time of printing., making reactions and evaluations of the vote based only on unofficial projections. Especially since several regions of the country combine densely populated cities with vast rural areas.

For the past two decades, La Paz has been administered by two lawyers, Juan del Granado and Luis Revilla, who initially belonged to MAS and later formed his own political organization, Soberanía y Libertad (Sol.bo). The ruling party bet in these elections on the former director of the state-owned company Mi Teleférico, César Dockweiler, to try to seduce the electorate of La Paz.

In the heat of the moment, President Luis Arce assured that the “only” candidate capable of securing a job “hand in hand with the government” was that of Dockweiler, something which apparently did not go well with the government. La Paz, which finally, he would opt for the ex-minister of the de facto government, Iván Arias.

In Santa Cruz for years, the hegemony was of the engineer Percy Fernández, mayor of that city six times. In her place, the architect Angélica Sosa succeeded, the heiress of Fernández who could not keep the town hall, even if the official candidate, the former senator Adriana Salvatierra, could not recover it. Polls show a narrow margin between journalist Gary Áñez, from the party of former President Carlos Mesa, and experienced politician Johnny Fernández, so that the final winner will only be known at the end of the official scoring.

The central region of Cochabamba is considered one of the strongholds of the ruling party among other reasons because There is the coca cultivation area of ​​Chapare, the trade union and political stronghold of former president Evo Morales. This hegemony is not so strong in the capital, Cochabamba, where there is a very marked polarization between the followers of the MAS and its detractors, “differences” recognized by Morales himself on Sunday evening, after having known the unofficial results. who give the triumph of the former opposition captain of the armed forces, Manfred Reyes Villa.

The surprise in this electoral process was former Senate President Eva Copa, expelled from the ruling party for running with another acronym for Mayor of El Alto., another massist stronghold. The exit polls give the Copa a large victory over the official Zacarías Maquera, with which the MAS lost for the second time in a row the municipality of El Alto, currently administered by the opposition Soledad Chapetón.

“I am grateful to Evo Morales and ask him to listen to his people and accept constructive criticism,” Copa said on Monday, which obtained 66.8% of the vote, according to projections, against 19.9% for the candidate. From MAS, Zacarías Maquera.

In other regional capitals, the ruling party appears with triumphs in Sucre, the constitutional capital of Bolivia, and in the Amazonian city of Cobija and obtains an unclear result in Oruro, while in Tarija, Trinidad and Potosí other parties have won.

For Evo Morales, the regional and municipal results indicate that “the MAS is consolidated as the first political force in the history of Bolivia”. The former president said his activists “should feel proud” to be part of this organization, and thanked the “Bolivian people” for their “commitment” to “the homeland, economic policies and social programs”.

The preliminary results, however, generated discomfort among part of the MAS leadership. “We have fallen between 15 and 20% compared to the general elections of 2019 and” it is not new because it has already happened “, recognized the official president of the Senate, Andrónico Rodríguez. These results “will call us to think about and adjust many errors in the MAS, if there has been a miscalculation”The leader of coca producers also pointed out during a press conference.

The official count of Sunday’s regional elections in Bolivia will end next weekend, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) announced on Monday. Sources from the Electoral Courts of the Departments of Santa Cruz and Pando separately indicated that The situation of more than a hundred polling stations whose ballot boxes were set on fire by neighbors who denounced suspected fraud has not yet been decided.. Regional courts must verify whether the tally sheets have also been destroyed.