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Bolivia begins the municipal and regional campaign with tensions in the party of Evo Morales and in the opposition

2020-12-30T23:01:33.713Z


The former interim president Jeanine Áñez and the ultra-conservative Luis Fernando Camacho aspire to the governorship of two departments


Former Bolivian President Evo Morales at an event last November.UESLEI MARCELINO / Reuters

Another electoral campaign begins in Bolivia.

The Andean country, which has just elected its new president, Luis Arce, representative of the party of Evo Morales, will now replace its mayors, councilors, governors and members in the departmental assemblies, which have had a one-year extension of mandate by the pandemic.

Some 20,000 applicants of all stripes have signed up to fill the 5,000 vacant positions.

The elections will be on March 7, 2021, if the outbreak of covid-19 that Bolivia has begun to suffer allows it.

The pre-campaign has been marked by tensions within the Movement for Socialism (MAS), the former president's party, and among the opposition candidates.

The most striking figure on the opposition lists is former interim president Jeanine Áñez, who aspires to be the governor of her home region, Beni, in the northwest.

Áñez is being targeted by the Movement to Socialism (MAS), which wants to prosecute her for alleged crimes against human rights during her administration.

“I was in the dilemma of staying at home and assuming my role as former president or accepting the candidacy for the Interior;

I opted for the latter, ”he said in his launch speech.

In order to register, he had to resign from his party, with which he had been in bad relations for a long time, and run for another center-right organization.

He promised to differentiate himself from the "politicians of the past" and give cash aid to Benianos, who like all Bolivians are burdened by the economic and health crisis.

Another important opposition candidate is Luis Fernando Camacho, the ultra-conservative leader of the protests that preceded the overthrow of President Evo Morales on November 10, 2019. Camacho has also been sued by the MAS, which accuses him of having mounted a coup against Morales.

Now he will be "the candidate of unity" against the party of the former president for the governorship of Santa Cruz, the richest in the country.

Camacho obtained the majority of the votes in this important square in the presidential elections of October 18.

If the opposition is relatively united in Santa Cruz, it is not, on the other hand, in the rest of the country, where multiple anti-officialist candidates compete with each other.

In La Paz, for example, 17 fronts compete to become the best option "against the MAS."

But unity has not only been difficult for opponents to achieve.

The Movement for Socialism has also experienced a very intense and conflictive process of candidate selection, in which two or more internal factions have often clashed strongly.

Evo Morales admitted that he was having more difficulties than ever in drawing up the list of candidates, a task that has always been difficult in the party he leads.

“Where there is conviction there are no fights, where there is ambition there is a lot of fight.

Why ambition?

Because ideology training is still lacking, it is our weakness ”, he explained to the press.

At one of the leaders' meetings, one of the attendees threw a plastic chair onto the stage, which fell on the former president.

This fact was interpreted by his rivals as proof of the decline of his political influence.

The disorder in this and other meetings had been caused by what the MAS bases call the "dedazo", that is, the appointment by the party leadership of the candidates, without taking into account the preferences of the militants in cities and towns. .

Morales assures that he has not manipulated anyone or defined the candidacies, something that for some observers has a lot of support, since, with the MAS bases in a state of great turmoil, the former president has had to make many concessions and this has led to Democratically supported candidacies that are not the best from a political marketing point of view.

In the opinion of the analyst Pablo Stefanoni, one of the characteristics of the MAS most appreciated by its militants - who come from the lower sectors of the population, mostly indigenous - is its condition as an effective instrument for their access to the State.

Morales may no longer be able to define all the names, but instead he still has strong veto power.

Her opposition to the candidacy of Eva Copa for mayor of El Alto, the only city in the country in which the MAS swept in the last elections, caused this former senator, who has great support from neighborhood organizations, to apply with another political organization, which will cost him the expulsion of his party.

Copa was the president of the Legislative Assembly during Áñez's interim government.

During this period, she had a lot of power and a relatively autonomous behavior with respect to Morales, which ended up distancing her from him.

The splitting of the MAS is a rare event, since one of the keys to the strength of this party has so far been its ability to have multiple factions without breaking with any.

Some analysts think that it may initiate the formation of a leftist option to MAS, an alternative that has not existed until now.

The internal struggle in the ruling party has increased because in the recent presidential elections the MAS won 300 of the 342 municipalities and obtained a majority in six of the nine regions that the country has. Therefore, defending the flag of this party in these new elections is a sure trump card everywhere except in the big capital cities. Precisely for this reason, the opposition is particularly fragmented in these cities. Another cause of the MAS internal struggles is the economic crisis that the country is experiencing, which this year will decrease by more than 9% of its Gross Domestic Product. The crisis has turned politics into the only way of social mobility and even economic survival for many.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-12-30

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