Shortly after Luis Arce Catacora confidently predicted his own victory, two major polling firms released their counts of today’s election, both of which projected a 20% margin of victory for the Movement Towards Socialism in an historic election. The current projected margin doubles the largest advantage (10%) estimated by any pre-election poll and is far more than needed for Arce to avoid a runoff. Indeed, they project Arce’s party winning a simple majority of all votes, something it has done in three prior national elections and which no other political party has done since the 1960s.
While data are preliminary, interim president Jeanine Áñez has congratulated her political opponents on their apparent victory:
Second-place finisher Carlos Mesa’s campaign retired from public appearances early in the night and he has not commented on the late-night vote estimates online. Technically the election is his to concede, and that might only come once the official results resemble the unofficial ones.
However, there are now coinciding vote analyses by polling organizations CiesMori and Tu Voto Cuenta:
The regional breakdown published by CiesMori shows just how Arce, VP candidate David Choquehuanca, and the MAS-IPSP pulled off this remarkable comeback: they won by regaining back the votes they lost in the west and Chuquisaca between 2014 and 2019. Here’s a preliminary look at the shifts between those three elections.
Again, these figures are preliminary. Tu Voto Cuenta’s departmental results are still being posted to Twitter as I write this, and the official count has barely reached 8% of precincts, but Bolivian politics have taken a very dramatic turn tonight.
Moreover, the bet placed by the hard Right in 2019, that claiming the state and using an interim government to target the MAS-IPSP and sometimes also its base for prosecutions and intimidation would cement a post-MAS political future has failed dramatically. Even before tonight’s results, that was already clear for Bolivia’s hard Right as represented by Jeanine Áñez and Luis Camacho. Now it looks to be true for the anti-MAS coalition as a whole.
Carwil without Borders 