Rodrigo Paz Pereira wins Bolivia’s presidential runoff marking a new shift to the right | Bolivia

Center-right senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira, 58, won Sunday’s presidential runoff election in Bolivia and will become the country’s next president, shifting to the right after nearly 20 years of dominance of the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas) party.

With just over 97% of the votes counted, according to the electoral court’s “preliminary” count, Paz Pereira received 54.6% of the vote, while right-wing former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga received 45.4%.

The electoral court emphasized that the figures were “preliminary and not final”. That’s because Bolivia uses two counts: a faster count that relies on photos of each ballot sent to a data processing center, and a slower final count in which each vote is publicly counted and inspected at polling stations before entering the system.

The court has up to seven days to announce official results.

“Let’s continue to build a future, a new path, after 20 years that have left us outside the economy and geopolitics. We must create jobs,” Paz Pereira told supporters at a hotel in La Paz just two hours after the results were announced.

He added: “Ideology doesn’t put food on the table. What does that is the right to work, strong institutions, legal security, respect for private property and having certainty about your future – and that’s what we want to work for.”

Bolivia’s next president also mentioned his US counterpart Donald Trump, saying he hopes to “establish a close relationship with one of the most important governments in the world, to be part of the solutions starting from November 8.” [the inauguration date] moving forward and ensuring that Bolivia does not experience a hydrocarbon deficiency.”

Paz Pereira, senator for the Tarija region, is the son of former president Jaime Paz Zamora, who ruled the country from 1989 to 1993.

Although he was a seasoned politician (having served as a city councilman, mayor, and congressman) he tried to present himself as an outsider and was the big surprise of the first round, winning after starting his campaign at the bottom of the opinion polls.

According to the electoral court and international observers, including the European Union, the election day was peaceful.

Defeated candidate Quiroga, who was president for 12 months between 2001 and 2002 and is making his fourth attempt to return to power, began his speech at a La Paz hotel where his team was meeting by saying he had called Paz Pereira to congratulate him, which prompted a “No!” from the crowd.

“Please, I understand the pain we feel. Believe me, if we had systematic evidence [of electoral fraud]Stating that he will follow the final vote count, Quiroga added that he “respected the work” of the election court in the first round and “will respect it” in the second round.

In addition to being Bolivia’s first presidential runoff, Sunday’s elections marked the first time since 2005 that no candidate from the Mas party, which came to power first with Evo Morales and later with current president Luis Arce, was on the ballot for a presidential election.

The highly unpopular Arce chose not to run and instead put forward interior minister Eduardo del Castillo, who won just over 3% of the vote in the first round; this was the minimum number of votes needed for the party to retain its legal status.

The collapse of the once-dominant party is attributed to a bitter fight between Morales and his former political protégé Arce and the country’s deep economic crisis – the worst in four decades – marked by soaring inflation and shortages of both dollars and fuel.

Shortly after the polls closed, a photo was published on the official Facebook page of the deputy minister in charge of communications: “Masistas [Mas members] We are finally leaving! After 20 years of destroying the country.” The post was deleted a few hours later and it is still unclear who uploaded it.

The party that once held two-thirds of Congress will have only two congressmen and no senators in the next chamber.

The structure of the congress is already seen as one of Paz Pereira’s biggest challenges as president.

Although his party, Partido Democrata Cristiano (PDC), won the most seats with 49 deputies and 16 senators, it will not have the majority to pass laws and reforms.

Paz Pereira spent his final years traveling around Bolivia (by his count, visiting about 220 of the country’s 327 municipalities), winning particularly in areas that until recently had been Mas’ strongholds.

In a country where economists estimate 80 percent of the workforce consists of self-employed and informal workers, Paz Pereira campaigned on a platform of “people’s capitalism” and promised low-interest loans to small entrepreneurs.

He also promised to cancel citizens’ debts to the government to stimulate the economy and to reduce import tariffs on goods such as technology and vehicles, saying “there will be no more smuggling because everything will be legal” in Bolivia.

However, many analysts believe that the decisive factor in Paz Pereira’s success was the popularity of his vice president, former police captain Edman Lara Montaño (39).

Known as Captain Lara, he rose to fame for exposing alleged cases of corruption within the police force in videos that went viral on TikTok, which ultimately led to his dismissal from the force.

Running for the first time on the “anti-corruption” banner, Captain Lara appeared as an independent candidate and said that he would have no problem opposing the next president if he saw something wrong, saying, “I am the guarantee; if Rodrigo Paz does not deliver, I will confront him.”

After the results were announced, Lara said: “We must rebuild the country’s economy; we must guarantee the supply of diesel and gasoline. People are suffering; we must stabilize the prices of basic goods and put an end to corruption.”

In addition to the deep economic crisis, another of Arce’s “legacies” that Paz Pereira will have to deal with is the arrest warrant against Morales, who was in central Bolivia last year and prevented the arrest of hundreds of coca farmers for allegedly having fathered children with a 15-year-old boy while he was president.

During the campaign, Paz Pereira said that if elected, the law would apply to Evo Morales “as it does to other citizens.”