October 21, 2019
Bolivia’s President Evo Morales was elected for fourth time in a row in general elections last Sunday, together with his Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera.
According to official results, Morales, candidate for the Movement Towards Socialism, received the required amount of votes to win the presidency in the first electoral round by beating his closest opponent by 10 percentage points. The President received 46.8 percent to Carlos Mesa, his closest opponent who got 36.7 percent of the vote.
.On November 2017, Bolivia’s Constitutional Tribunal authorized Morales to run again in the presidential held Sunday.
Morales has promised to maintain the nation as the leader of economic growth in Latin America and a benchmark for the distribution of wealth. Just prior to the election a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) analyzed Bolivia’s economic changes since 2006 in the context of the government’s main policy decisions. It finds that it has been policy choices, not merely a “commodities boom,” that have been the driving force in Bolivia’s surge to the fastest-growing economy in South America over the past five years. Strong economic growth has allowed Bolivia to reduce poverty by 42 percent and extreme poverty by 60 percent since President Evo Morales took office in 2006.
Recently the Indigenous leader pledged, “Every day we start working before five in the morning and we end up after midnight. I do not want to be the best President in Bolivia’s history. I want to be the President of the best Bolivia in its history.”
Elections last Sunday took place without incident, according to reports of the Supreme Electoral Court. In addition, the election was observed by 200 individuals from international organizations.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano, translation North America bureau