And Now the Results – Same as Before, Government by Negotiation

Here are the latest results from yesterday’s dual vote in Bolivia, to elect members to the Constituent Assembly and the region-by-region vote on regional autonomy.

Seats in the Constituent Assembly

MAS 53%
PODEMOS 23.5%
UN 4.3%
MNR/FRI 3.5%
MNR 2.7%
MBL 2.3%
CN 2%
ASP 1.2
OTHERS 1.2%

Regional Autonomy

National Results:

NO 56%, YES 44%

Departmental Results:

NO – Chuquisaca, La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosi
YES – Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija, Pando

What Does All This Mean

First, as a measure of popular support for Bolivia’s various political parties, it means voters are pretty much exactly where they were in December. MAS holds basically the same strong majority (53% now, 53,7% in December), Jorge Quirga’s PODEMOS is a distant second and lost five points (23.5% now, 28.6% in December) and Samuel Doria Medina’s UN party still runs a very distant third and also lost support (4.3% now, 7.8% in December).

It is also a pretty good indication that PODEMOS' strategy, of running against Hugo Chavez instead of for any concrete vision for Bolivia's future, well, it didn't work at all. Back to the drawing boards for Quiroga and his campaign consultants.

More importantly, it still means that Bolivia will navigate its political way forward through negotiation. Evo Morales and MAS doesn’t have a working majority in the Congress sufficient to do much of want it wants on its own (the convening of the Assembly vote was itself a party-to-party negotiation, which is why political parties ran the show) and it won’t have the 2/3 vote required to take action on a new constitution in the Assembly. In other words, whatever happens in the Assembly, and with the implementation of autonomy, will be a negotiation among the political parties.

Negotiation is pretty much what all Bolivian politics is about these days. The government has set a six-month period for renegotiating its contracts with foreign oil companies. It has been negotiating with unions and others over what to do with the collapsing airline, LAB. It is negotiating on land, on teacher salaries, and on a wide range of other issues.

In other words, for those looking for Bolivia to turn into a one party state with authoritarian rule, you just won’t find it here. In its place you will find something else, a democracy with many players and a lot of complicated issues to talk through. For a country that had endured far more than its share of dictatorships, that’s not a bad thing at all, not by a long shot.