BOLIVIA: GENERAL ELECTION MAKES COCALERO EVO MORALES FIRST INDIGENOUS PRESIDENT.
Bolivian presidential elections on Dec. 18, 2005, ended with an overwhelming victory for former coca grower Evo Morales of the Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS). In a field of eight candidates, Morales took nearly 54% of the vote, meaning he will be sworn in as president on Jan. 22, 2006, the first indigenous president in the majority indigenous country. The large majority for Morales proved pre-election polls to be widely inaccurate. They had anticipated he would gain a plurality of between 30% and 40%.
Biggest mandate for a Bolivian president in decades
In the Dec. 23 figures released by the Corte Nacional Electoral (CNE), Morales received 53.73% of the vote, demolishing his nearest competitor, former President Jorge Quiroga Ramirez (2001-2002) of Poder Democratico Social (Podemos), who finished with 28.59%. Businessman Samuel Doria Medina of Unidad Nacional (UN) took 7.80% of the vote, and Michiaki Nagatani of the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR), the party of former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (2002-2003), received 6.46%.
When those figures were released, the CNE had finished tallying 84.35% of the votes from 99.81% of the country's 21,072 electoral stations, or mesas. The CNE said the figures were practically definitive at that point. Of 3,670,971 registered voters, the CNE had counted 3,096,801 votes, meaning voter participation was 84.52%. There were 3.98% blank ballots and 3.36% were annulled. The body said irregularities occurred at eight stations and one did not function, so the election would be repeated on Jan. 1 in the affected areas.
Under Bolivian electoral law, if a candidate finishes without a more than 50% majority, the decision goes to the Congress, where the two houses pick between the leading candidates. Morales' majority win made the congressional decision, which is frequently contentious and has led to unrest among many sectors, unnecessary. Since the 1985 return to democracy, the Congress twice decided against the first-place candidate.
When it became evident that Morales was winning by a large margin, Quiroga and other candidates conceded, even before it was clear whether MAS had won an outright majority.
In the Congress, the MAS gained a majority in the Chamber of Deputies and a near majority in the Senate.
Morales' vice president will be Alvaro Garcia Linera, a mathematician, sociologist, and ex-guerrilla fighter with the Tupac Katari movement.
The overwhelming victory for Morales proved wrong the...
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