Photo Credit: Flickr user vocesbolivianas
The official campaign season began this week in Bolivia, where, barring unforeseen developments – which aren’t out of the question given the country’s tumultuous recent history – President Evo Morales, who was first elected president in 2005, will be reelected to an unprecedented second term on December 6. The reelection bid became possible following a January 2009 referendum in which Bolivians approved a new constitution that granted Morales the right to seek a second term in office. All polls show the president, the leftist Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) candidate, with a commanding lead over his fellow contenders. A September 2009 Ipsos Apoyo poll shows Morales receiving 54 percent of the vote, with Manfred Reyes Villa, the former governor of Cochabamba and the Progress Plan Bolivia party candidate, coming in a distant second, with 20 percent. Another recent poll conducted by Equipos Mori shows Morales receiving between 47 and 59 percent of the vote and Reyes Villa garnering between 16 and 19 percent. Other notable opposition candidates include businessman Samuel Doria Medina of the National Unity party and indigenous Potosi Mayor Rene Joaquino of the Social Alliance, but both are far behind. Former president Jorge Quiroga and former vice-president Victor Hugo Cardenas once numbered amongst the contenders, but both dropped out of the race due to their poor chances of victory and stated desire to diminish opposition fragmentation. Morales can avoid a run-off either by garnering 50 percent of the vote, or 40 percent with a 10 percent lead over the nearest contender. With Morales’ support among the population increasing, victory appears all but assured.
Considering the turmoil that rocked Bolivia last year, the country’s relatively tranquil pre-campaign election season has been a relief. Throughout 2008, Bolivia’s centuries-old socioeconomic tensions, which to a large extent pose the European-descended and mestizo lowlands dwellers against Bolivia’s highlands-based indigenous majority, erupted into violent confrontation. Throughout August and September, the country was rocked by anti-government protests in the eastern provinces, where demands for greater autonomy spiked following Morales’ plans to redistribute lands and hydrocarbons wealth away from the lowlands. Anti-Morales demonstrators occupied government buildings and even caused an explosion of a natural gas pipeline. The unrest culminated in the “Pando massacre,” a clash between pro-Morales supporters and Pando officials that left at least 13 campesinos dead. With the approval of the constitution, however, the opposition seemed traumatized and disarticulated, and has struggled to come up with a positive message.
Although the opposition’s strategy, tactics, and vision have often ranged from questionable to condemnable, the Morales administration is not above criticism. Morales’ first term was marred by several unsettling governance practices. As the 2009 Freedom in the World report notes, media freedom has declined as violent attacks against journalists – abetted to some degree by aggressive government rhetoric – have increased, corruption has remained pervasive, and judicial independence and efficiency have been treated as relics as a past era. Furthermore, Morales’ response to opposition criticism has often seemed thin-skinned in the face of criticism. As a previous blog post notes, Morales has consistently confronted and harassed the opposition instead of adopting a more magnanimous approach. Such tactics as ordering the social bases of the MAS to surround the Congress in order to forcefully bring about favorable decisions have at times in the last two years seemed to cost Morales some of the middle-class support he garnered in 2005.
The opposition has certainly attempted to parlay these and other issues into an anti-MAS message. However, it has been far less successful in presenting a positive reform agenda that demonstrates that it has learned any lessons over the last three years, a deficit that has been costly. Attempts to capitalize on anti-government sentiments have generally backfired, most notably in the August 2008 recall referendum, in which 67 percent of voters affirmed their support for the president even as Cochabamba voters threw Reyes Villa out of office. As the New York Times notes, despite the strong anti-Morales sentiment in the East, Morales has maintained power and support among the population and within government institutions that matter the most. As the Democracy Center explains, Morales’ success, along with his likely reelection, can largely be explained by the fact that he can still count on overwhelming support amongst the indigenous majority, who continue to consider Morales the embodiment of their movement. Most notably, among the urban Aymara residents of El Alto (Bolivia’s third-largest city), Morales’ approval rating is over 90 percent, and the president can count on an over 80 percent approval rating in La Paz and the altiplano.
In turn, the failure of the opposition to challenge the president is mainly the result of its own internal lack of cohesion and strategy. After the 2005 election entirely upended Bolivia’s traditional political scene, the opposition was left the task of picking up the pieces and reformulating themselves. As opposed to the past, the opposition movement is now centered on regional governors rather than the Congress, and more importantly, remains divided. These governors have worked to fuel anti-government protests within their provinces, but have been unable to come together to build a strong national political force with the ability to challenge Morales on Election Day. As academic Miguel Centellas argues, “The opposition is currently fractionalized. The strategy of a united front is there, but egos (who gets top billing on the ticket?) get in the way. Evo’s dominance is, in large part, a product of a complete realignment of Bolivia’s political axis.” For his part, presidential candidate Rene Joaquino has called the opposition movement a “bag of cats in which all candidates scratch each other to win presidential candidacy, without there being any ideological consensus.” While Reyes Villa, the current opposition frontrunner who has the greatest likelihood of bringing about opposition unity in the long run if not today, can count on the backing of the Cochabamba political machine, he is not supported countrywide, and is seen by many as all too representative of a pre-Evo mentality. His controversial choice of Pando ex- prefect Leopoldo Fernandez (who is currently in jail awaiting charges related to his involvement in the Pando massacre) as his running mate may serve him quite well, as it could secure the support of both the strategically important Pando and the virulently anti-Morales eastern elites who consider Fernandez to be a political prisoner. While this will probably not be enough to win the election, Reyes Villa may win the ability to galvanize and a national opposition in the post-election period.
Despite the seeming lack of suspense in the presidential race, Bolivia’s medium-term political outlook remains murky. Whether Reyes Villa successfully holds together the opposition in the post-election period or not, the question of how to articulate a platform other than “no MAS” will likely continue to hamstring the opposition. Latin America’s new wave of populist leaders has a way of creating this situation: opposition movements in Nicaragua, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Colombia have all struggled to paper over significant ideological differences through the unifying theme of anti-incumbency. The MAS, for its part, has no natural successor to Morales, who has pledged not to run again in 2014. Moreover, many basic questions about institutions and social structures in the new Bolivia remain unanswered. So while 2009 has been blessedly calm compared to 2008, storms are likely not far from roiling Bolivia’s turbid waters.