Well, Bolivia Was Supposed to Have Elections December 4th…

As I have written before, never be surprised by the surprises that can arise out of Bolivian politics. Now we have yet another. The national elections scheduled for December 4th may well be postponed until, well, who knows when. Here's the story.

Last June a series of nationwide social protests over two issues – corporate ownership of the nation's gas and the call for a citizen assembly to rewrite the constitution – culminated in the resignation of President Carlos Mesa. He resigned more because he seemed to want out than because of any broad demand that he do so.

Mesa's resignation and the assumption of the Presidency by the Supreme Court head, Eduardo Rodriguez, triggered new Presidential elections that were scheduled for December 4th. In a move that was always constitutionally debatable, the government ceded to social movement demands that the new elections also toss out and replace the sitting Congress as well, a move resisted by Congress members not too keen to give up their sought-after jobs two years early.

In any event, by late August the Bolivian campaign season was in full swing with candidates selected for seats all the way down the slate, from President to Congress, and the slogans and promises started flying in from all sides.

Then the congressional delegation from Santa Cruz through a big whopping monkey wrench into the whole process. The December elections were to be based on the population figures from Bolivia's 1991 national census not the much more current 2001 count of where Bolivians reside.

Translated into regular words, this means that Santa Cruz, Cochabamba and other areas of big population growth are headed into elections in which they aren’t getting their fair share of congressional seats (and in turn, their fair share in the congressional vote that will elect the new president in January). The Santa Cruz delegation filed a legal demand to stop the elections and correct the numbers and on September 22 Bolivia's Constitutional Tribunal, which rules on such matters, agreed and ordered that the elections not go forward as planned.

Well, one thing that you can be sure of is that when a major constitutional issue is at stake, in Bolivia or any country, the political actors involved will make a quick assessment of their political self-interest and launch a battle to defend it. Bolivia's political leaders have proven no exception to that rule.

Congress members from La Paz, Oruro and Potosi, all areas which stand to lose seats if the 2001 census data is used, have launched a defense that is essentially, "okay, if we are going to play strictly by the law let's play strictly by the law," and have called on the Congressional elections to be cancelled altogether until the normal 2007 schedule. Members of Congress who resigned their seats to run for higher office are now trying to see if they can take back their resignations. MAS Presidential candidate, Evo Morales, traveling in France this week issued a statement demanding that the elections go on as scheduled and warning, "It is not the social groups, it is not the indigenous movement that are challenging the country or destabilizing it. It is the state institutions, the Constitutional Court and behind them are the transnationals, the U.S. embassy, which wants to avert any triumph of the indigenous movement."

Meanwhile President Rodriguez and the Congress are wrapped in some sort of political dance trying to find a solution that can keep the December 4 election date in tact and Rodriguez is probably really wishing someone else held his unenviable job.

Personally, I don't see any real conspiracy here. I think that since the Mesa resignation in June Bolivia has been wandering in the risky land of dubious constitutionality. Most people sort of turned a bind eye to that and hoped that a brief bridge of dubious constitutionality would take Bolivia forward to a new start.

The new start never looked all that promising (see my recent analysis of possible election outcomes) and now it appears that the competing regional interests have called the question on Bolivian constitutionality.

What will happen next? As the saying goes: Those who know don't say and those who say don't know.