National Post (National Edition)
Morales is back, except he's not
The results are in, or at least the results that matter are, and after what appears to have been a generally clean and fair election, Bolivia's exceedingly grimy year-old interim government has conceded that it is ready to give way to the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). That's the party of the mercurial strongman Evo Morales, who's beloved by gringo “anti-imperialists” everywhere.
Remember him? His 14-year reign came to a shabby and violent end last October after a botched and fraud-riddled national election plunged the country into a state of massive social upheaval. The riots and chaos persuaded Morales to resign and flee the country, shouting about a fascist coup on his way out, even though Morales himself declared the disputed election result invalid three weeks after the 2019 vote and called for new elections. A followup election is not exactly what you'd expect if there had been an actual coup in 2019.
And you certainly wouldn't have expected last weekend's result, which has elevated Luis Arce, the talented economist who served as Bolivia's economics and public finance minister through the Morales years, to his place as Bolivia's de facto president-elect.
This is what should have happened last year. Instead, Bolivians have had to endure a year of the cruel and incompetent far-right regime of Jeanine Áñez Chávez, whose only legitimacy in the first place was her strictly temporary role as president, which she acquired only by securing just enough votes in the Bolivian Chamber of Senators while the country was in turmoil in the immediate aftermath of the 2019 election debacle.
Just one of the reasons everyone has had to wait a year for a legitimate Bolivian government is that Morales had been lifting several pages from the handbook for megalomaniacs mastered by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, especially the handy guide on how to dodge constitutionally required presidential term limits. In Morales' case, he went so far as to defy a 2016 referendum result that went against his hopes to amend Bolivia's constitutional rule limiting him to two terms. Morales finagled his way around that by relying on a stacked high court vote. If Morales had won last October, it would have been his fourth term.
As things have turned out, MAS is back as the Bolivian government, but Morales, currently in Argentina, won't be. The left-populist former lama herder and coca union organizer still commands the loyalties of broad sections of Bolivia's poor and Indigenous people, along with the sympathy of left-populist authoritarians like Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. But Arce said he sees no place for Morales in government.
Morales is entitled to return to Bolivia, Arce told the Reuters news service on Tuesday, but Morales won't be offered a job in the new administration. Morales can stay on as party president, but that's it. “He will not have any role in our government,” Arce said. “He can return to the country whenever he wants, because he's Bolivian … but in the government it's me who has to decide who forms a part of the administration and who does not.”
As soon as the final tally is counted up and the official result is declared, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau should extend Canada's congratulations to the Bolivian people and to Luis Arce. Early counts in the weekend election — which the interim government had postponed three times — show that Luis Fernando Camacho, the candidate favoured by Áñez, finished a distant third.
Carlos Mesa, Bolivia's bookish second-place and “centrist” presidential hopeful, congratulated Arce on his early showings and conceded that his own place would be as leader of the opposition. And Arce extended an open hand, pledging to make every effort to form a national unity government in light of the precarious economic and political predicament the country finds itself in.
Arce is widely credited with steering Bolivia's progress through the Morales years with fairly conventional social-democratic policies that helped raise Bolivia's gross domestic product by nearly five per cent a year. Poverty was dramatically reduced and literacy rates rose dramatically, but the COVID-19 crisis has now cut deep into Bolivia. With roughly 8,500 deaths out of a population of fewer than 12 million, Bolivia is saddled with one of the highest per-capita COVID-19 mortality rates in the world. The International Monetary Fund forecasts that the Bolivian economy will shrink by eight per cent this year.
The problems with the 2019 election were highlighted when returns showed Morales trailing, but then emerging with a barebones first-round victory after an abrupt and unexplained 24-hour intermission in polling reports. The process was tartly questioned by the Organization of American States' (OAS) Electoral Observation Mission, and ultimately rejected as illegitimate by most of the world's advanced economies.
Among other things, in 2019, the OAS cited the stacking of the electoral tribunal with Morales' cronies and the expenditure of state resources on the Morales campaign. A followup OAS audit requested by Morales himself found evidence of altered tally sheets, forged signatures of polling station officers and the weird redirection of election results to two secret computer network servers outside the control of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.
Still, the OAS can't catch a break with some people — not least the Venezuelan and Nicaraguan regimes and the overabundance of starry-eyed Morales enthusiasts in European and North American activist circles. In June, stating that the organization could “not stand idly and allow such trafficking in lies, falsehoods, errors or plain ignorance,” the OAS issued a furiously written broadside denouncing what it called a “disinformation campaign” about the conduct of the OAS in 2019 that it described as an effort to interfere in this year's election campaigning. “They have concocted a narrative of disinformation primarily aimed at attacking the (OAS) and seeking to change the perception of reality.”
Whether all the disinformation making the rounds swayed many votes in the weekend's polling in Bolivia is hard to say. But at least, so far, there aren't any serious arguments about who won.
MORALES CAN STAY ON AS PARTY PRESIDENT, BUT THAT'S IT.