Sen. Rodrigo Paz, the centrist dark horse, received more votes than the right-wing front-runners on Sunday, but not enough to win the election outright, setting the stage for an unusual runoff presidential election.
The right-wing former president Jorge Tuto Quiroga, who came in second, will take on Paz, a former mayor who has worked to smooth the edges of the opposition’s call for strict austerity to save Bolivia from economic disaster, on October 19.
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Paz received 32.8% of the votes cast, with more than 91% of the ballots counted on Sunday. 26.4% was earned by Quiroga. In order to avoid a runoff, candidates had to reach 50%, or 40% with a 10-point victory margin.
After over two decades of domination, the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party in the Andean nation suffered a serious setback as a result of the results. The party was founded by the charismatic former president Evo Morales, who became part of the pink tsunami of leftist leaders who stormed into power throughout Latin America during the early 2000s commodities boom.
Eduardo del Castillo, the official MAS candidate, received only 3.2% of the vote and came in sixth. The 36-year-old Senate President Andro Rodriguez, the other communist candidate who ran for a branch of the now-splintered party, received only 8% of the vote.
Paz’s victory surprised the country, which had been conditioned by weeks of polling to believe that Quiroga and multimillionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina, the front-runners on the right, would win the top two seats.
Doria Medina’s campaign for president has already failed four times. On Sunday, he assured glum-faced supporters that he had no regrets.
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“I wanted to be president of Bolivia, but it hasn’t been possible,” he stated.
Bolivian reluctance about a complete political shift to the same right-wing establishment that Morales blew away when he surged to power in 2006 and famously declared an end to Bolivia’s 20-year experiment with free-market capitalism appears to be reflected in the rise of the more moderate Paz.
Paz has made an effort to disassociate himself from Morales’ now-defunct MAS party, which has been unable to stop an economic collapse.
Additionally, he has opposed right-wing promises to sell Bolivia’s vast lithium riches to international corporations and seek billions of dollars in loans from the International Monetary Fund.
The future course of this 12 million-person landlocked country, which is struggling with a severe fuel shortage, double-digit inflation, and a lack of US cash, is at risk.
