The Left Begins to Unite

During the first month of election preparations here in Bolivia, the scenario looked much like this:

First, Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga looked to be developing a broad, united and articulate campaign to try to make Bolivia’s political right wing look like the instrument of reform.
A former Banzer Vice-President has been using the world “indigena” in almost every other sentence of his political speechmaking.

Second, the three major parties n the mega-coalition that took office in 2002 each seemed to be imploding. The MRN of Goni and the MIR of Jaime Paz will field candidates so weak they don’t register in the polls. The NFR, which is still essentially the party of one man, former Cochabamba Mayor Manfred Reyes Villa, probably won’t have a candidate as all as “Bon Bom” (as he called) aims lower and runs for governor of the state of Cochabamba.

Third, Bolivia’s political left has looked like a movement caught off guard and deeply fragmented. Every week you could find a new gathering of political groups on the left, harshly critical of MAS candidate Evo Morales and planning a separation. Half the people present at these seemed to be getting ready to launch Presidential candidacies of their own. Disunity was almost becoming the left’s strategy – every region with its own Presidential candidate.

In other words Tuto has looked like a candidate free of the big divisions that usually hold the “traditional” parties to 22% or so (equal to Evo’s take in 2002). Tuto has looked capable of breaking into 30% support and higher.

However, as political winds tend to do, Bolivia’s are shifting.

Samuel Doria Medina, with a fresh new running mate plucked from the Center of Santa Cruz’s campaign for autonomy is starting to eat up good chunks of the political support Tuto was hoping to call his own. This Bolivian election will have two champions of market fundamentalism – one from IBM and one from Burger King (Quiroga spent years working for the former and Median owns the latter in Bolivia).

The left, having taken a look at the political abyss and not found it to its liking, has cooked up another plan. Many of the social movements who are not keen on marching lockstep behind Evo but who see the strategic pitfalls of a divorce, are charting a creative course. The movements (and my intelligence on this is solid) will form a united front behind the well-known and regarded political analyst Alvaro García Linera. Rather than launch his own candidacy, García Linera, representing the movements, will agree to be the MAS Vice-Presidential candidate, in exchange for specific commitments on issues such as the convening of an Asamblea Constituyente and restoration of national control of Bolivia’s gas and oil, the two demands in the forefront of the May-June protests.

Besides Quiroga, Medina, and Morales, the other significant candidate will be René Joaquino Cabrera, the Mayor of Potosi, who heads a political alliance of several of the country’s mayors, including those of La Paz and Cochabamba. That alliance came close to joining with Morales as well, and while it stopped short of doing so, it is much more likely that it would join a post-election coalition with MAS than with Quiroga.

So now the political question is this: What sort of vote total can we expect from the combination of Evo Morales, with a unified left behind him, and a candidacy backed by the country’s mayors? How will that compare with what Quiroga can get with a strong and getting stronger Doria Medina chipping away at his base? Quiroga has said that if he doesn’t come in first, he won’t accept the Presidency.

Mix all this politics together, do the math, and add in four months of political uncertainties and I might have to take back my words earlier that a MAS victory is impossible.

Now if MAS can just get the US Ambassador to denounce Morales to voters as his predecessor did in 2002 (rocketing his support in the polls) we might just have a real race on our hands.