The mandate of the Bolivian voters has been so massive that there will be no need for the run off as the MAS candidates Luis Arce for President and David Choquehuanca got 53 per cent votes much more than what was needed for the run off. As against them, rightwing presidential candidate Carlos Mesa, president of Bolivia from 2003 to 2005 got only 31.2 per cent of the votes and another rightwing candidate Luis Fernando Camacho garnered just 14.1 per cent of the votes. The outcome was so overwhelming that the present president Anez who did not contest the elections, conceded defeat and welcomed the MAS leader to form the new government in strife torn country for bringing stability and peace.

Evo Morales, the towering figure of the MAS and deposed president, now in exile in Argentina, was ecstatic after the victory. He said that the results proved convincingly how the rightists scuttled a government of MAS last year by staging a coup and spreading false propaganda about the earlier rigged elections. Morales will be back soon and he will be available to the new MAS leadership for advice. The rightists tried till two weeks back not to allow the elections in Bolivia since the opinion polls were indicating big lead of MRS candidates and the right forces were also divided. The people’s unprecedented response to the MAS campaign was such that the senior military leaders who in November last year forced Morales to step down and leave the country, took neutral positions and allowed the elections to be held freely.

From Buenos Aires, where he lives in exile, former President Morales proclaimed, “We have recovered democracy.” MAS gained control of both houses of parliament. At a Monday morning press conference, Morales said the ending of his exile was imminent. “Sooner or later we are going to return to Bolivia, that is not in debate.”

Morales, in power from 2006 until being overthrown in 2019, was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president. Under his leadership, Bolivia’s poor and mostly indigenous majority secured rights and economic gains. Nationalization of oil and natural gas production turned into a revenue bonanza for social programs. Bolivia’s government was put on a secure financial footing. Morales gained worldwide attention for espousing Indigenous rights and for bringing attention to the global environmental crisis.

A military coup backed by the United States and the Organization of American States brought down Morales’s government on Nov. 10, 2019. In the process, Luis Fernando Camacho, a lead plotter and a recent presidential candidate, displayed fascist-like ideology and his own brand of Protestant fundamentalism. Jeanine Añez, the coup government’s interim president, did not run in the recently completed elections.

Following the coup of 2019, the government of Añez cancelled presidential elections set for May and for September. Her pretext was danger from COVID-19; though many viewed it as an effort to stall a bad outcome for the right wing. An observer suggested the delays actually gave time to Bolivians, allowing them to experience “White supremacist, racist, fascist-like politics and to make comparisons with what had been a revolutionary process that over 14 years changed the face and whole nature of this Bolivia.”

Indeed, unemployment moved from 3.9 per cent in mid-2019 to 11.8 per cent a year later; poverty increased markedly in 2020, and the rate of economic growth fell almost 6 per cent..In the last one year since the removal of Morales, the underprivileged people lost many of the facilities given to them during Morales presidency. The workers and peasants in Bolivia continuously held demonstrations against the coup regime and the popular rating of the rightwing president dipped to historic low. As a result President Anez decided not to contest in the Presidential elections.

Luis Arce served as economics minister under Morales from 2006 until the November 2019 coup. He arranged for nationalization of hydrocarbon extraction and the financing of social programs. He was chiefly responsible for Bolivia achieving the highest rate of GDP growth for Latin America and accumulating great amounts of foreign cash reserves.

Arce has proposed new taxation on Bolivia’s very wealthy. He recently claimed that MAS was “the only political party that guarantees that natural resources, including lithium, will not be privatized and handed over to transnationals.”

Many technology companies, including those that manufacture batteries for electric cars and mobile phones, have an interest in controlling the country’s lithium reserves, believed to be among the world’s largest.

Bolivia’s incoming vice president, David Choquehuanca, whose heritage is Indigenous and who is experienced in union organizing among rural workers, served as President Morales’s foreign minister from 2006 until January 2017.

In his own remarks, Luis Arce said nothing about inevitable speculation among democratic forces worldwide that his victory might strengthen resistance against recently installed neoliberal, U.S.–aligned governments in Latin America.

“We are recovering hope,” he declared, plus “the certainty that small, medium-sized, and big businesses will benefit, as will the public sectors and Bolivian families. I will govern for all Bolivians and, above all, will work to revamp efforts at achieving economic stability for the country.”

The immediate impact of the Bolivian turn around will be in Brazil where the right wing government of Bolsonaro is at the receiving end of the people. The Brazilian government is making all efforts to disallow the undisputed leader of the Brazilian Workers Party Lulla from active politics but Lulla’s popularity is at its peak while the present president’s rating has dipped to less than 10 per cent. The Brazilian economy is inn shambles and the Government has miserably failed to tackle with the pandemic. Brazil is now the third country in the world with largest infections. Political observers of Latin America are of the view that the movement against some of the right wing governments, will get momentum after the Left’s big success in Bolivian elections. (IPA Service)