Centrist triumphs in Bolivia’s presidential runoff

Rodrigo Paz, a centrist senator, will be Bolivia’s next president, preliminary results showed Monday, paving the way for a major political transformation after almost 20 years of rule by the Movement Toward Socialism party and during the nation’s worst economic crisis in decades.

- BY ISABEL DEBRE AND PAOLA FLORES

RODRIGO PAZ galvanized working-class voters outraged over record inflation to win Bolivia's presidency.

(NATACHA PISARENKO Associated Press)

“The trend is irreversible,” Óscar Hassenteufel, the president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, said of Paz’s lead over his rival, former right-wing President Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga. Paz won 54.5% of the votes, early results showed, versus Quiroga’s 45.5%.

Paz and his popular running mate, ex-police Capt. Edman Lara, galvanized working-class and rural voters outraged over record inflation and an acute dollar shortage that has sapped food and fuel supplies.

But for all their disillusionment with the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party, Bolivian voters seemed skeptical of Quiroga’s radical 180-degree turn away from the MAS-style social protections and toward an International Monetary Fund bailout.

Riven by internal divisions and battered by public anger over the economic crisis, MAS suffered a historic defeat in the Aug. 17 elections that propelled Quiroga and Paz to the runoff.

Paz’s victory sets this South American nation of 12 million on a sharply uncertain path as he seeks to enact major change for the first time since the 2005 election of Evo Morales, the founder of MAS and Bolivia’s first Indigenous president.

Although Paz’s Christian Democratic Party has the cushion of a slight majority in Congress, he'll still need to compromise to push through an ambitious overhaul.

Paz plans to end Bolivia’s fixed exchange rate, phase out generous fuel subsidies and reduce hefty public investment, redrawing much of the MAS economic model that has dominated Bolivia for two decades.

But he says he'll take a gradual approach to free-market reforms, in hopes of avoiding a sharp recession or jump in inflation that would enrage the masses — as has happened before in Bolivia.