Pablo Stefanoni, La Paz
Bolivia is once again on the path of political uncertainty, after the Constitutional Tribunal (CT) on September 22 ordered the Congress to modify the electoral law (used to convoke the December 4 general elections) to redistribute the congressional seats of each region according to the last population census (carried out in 2001).
The December elections are for president, vice-president, members of both houses of Congress, and for departmental prefects. The lower house Chamber of Deputies has 130 members, elected under a hybrid system of proportional representation and first-past-the-post, while the Senate has 27 members, three for each of Bolivia's nine departments. The system of representation â in both houses of Congress â tends to favour the smaller departments at the expense of the more populous ones.
The CT's ruling will favour Santa Cruz de la Sierra, a department in the country's east that has received strong internal migration. It will probably gain four more seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The department of Cochabamba, in the centre of the country, will probably gain two seats.
The main losers will be the poor, highland departments of Potos¡ and Oruro, as well as the capital La Paz, where many of Bolivia's highlanders have migrated over recent decades in search of employment and better living standards.
Meanwhile, a large number of legislators who in June accepted, begrudgingly, to submit themselves to new elections, are now making use of CT's ruling and the ebb in the popular mass mobilisations to attempt to stay in office until 2007.
The traditional governing parties â including the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), led from Washington by former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (forced to flee the country last year by a popular revolt) â have a congressional majority, but according to recent opinion polls will be pulverised in the December elections.
The front-runner in the opinion polls is Evo Morales, the leader of the country's coca farmers (cocaleros), candidate for the left-wing Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, Movement toward Socialism).
Not far behind Morales is former president Jorge Quiroga, a close friend of the United States.
A third candidate, Samuel Medina, a cement magnate and owner of the Burger King restaurants in Bolivia, is also a possible contender, although support for him has waned in recent weeks.
The redistribution of seats will probably benefit Jorge Quiroga and Samuel Doria Medina at the expense of Morales. Both Quiroga and Doria Medina are set to poll more votes in the lowland departments, where traditionally right-wing politicians do best.
"It is clear that there are conservative forces who do not want to leave power and could be involved possibly in a conspiracy", said the MAS vice-presidential candidate, Alvaro Garcia Linera.
Even the Bolivian mainstream press is talking of an attempt by the MNR to put in power â through a new judicial manoeuvre â Senate president Sandro Giordano. Others are betting on President Eduardo Rodriguez Veltze, Bolivia's fifth president in so many years, staying in office until 2007, despite his declaration that he will not remain in power after January 2006.
While the rightwing is fragmented, the left is now united around Morales' candidacy. An attempt by Jaime Solares, the leader of the Bolivian Workers Central (COB) union federation, to create an electoral alliance with Felipe Quispe, secretary general of the United Farm Workers Union of Bolivia, failed early on. Quispe's own candidature for his Pachacuti Indigenous Movement (MIP) failed to score more than 2% in the early opinion polls, even in the department of La Paz, once his stronghold of influence.
Fear of Morales winning the presidency is today the principal card that the US-educated Quiroga, a former mining company executive, has embarked on a US-style presidential campaign, i.e., one devoid of definite policy proposals but with lots of negative advertising against his rivals.
"If MAS wins, Bolivia will transform itself into a gigantic cocaine factory", spokesperson for Quiroga's Podemos party Hernan Terrazas has publicly claimed, referring to the MAS proposal to decriminalise the cultivation of the indigenous people's "sacred leaf". Similar declarations have given rise to accusations by the mass media is that Morales the "narco-candidate".
Bolivia's capitalist elite fear a "Chavista" course if Morales reaches the presidential Palacio Quemado. The US embassy has a similar fear, Nevertheless, this time the ambassador is maintaining a low profile to avoid having a similar effect to that caused during the 2002 elections when the declarations of then-ambassador Manuel Rocha contributed to building up Morales as the principal "anti-imperialist" leader of the country.
On the other hand, some members of the capitalist elite are hoping a Morales victory will end the country's chronic political instability and that a Morales government will discredit itself in the eyes of the masses as an "economic manager", thus leaving the road open to the restoration of the neoliberal "free market" agenda without worker and peasant revolts, as occurred after the failure of the left in the 1980s in the middle of a hyper-inflationary crisis.
MAS's election platform â presented on October 12 to a large rally â has synthesised its proposals around the "10 commandments", making the recovery of state control over privatised natural resources, principally natural gas, the centre of its economic agenda and the convocation of a constituent assembly to "refound the country".
From Green Left Weekly, November 2, 2005.
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