BOLIVIA: PRESIDENT EVO MORALES WINS MAJORITY FOR CONSTITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY, BUT MISSES TWO-THIRDS MARK.
Bolivian President Evo Morales' push to "refound" Bolivia through an Asamblea Constituyente to rewrite the Constitution is underway with the socialist president holding a majority in the assembly. Elections on July 2 did not go as much in Morales' favor as he had hoped, however, with the final tally handing his Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party 137 of 255 assembly seats, short of the two-thirds majority the party would need to control the group. Initial assembly sessions have begun in the historic capital city of Sucre, 425 km south of the present capital La Paz, with the full inauguration of the assembly set for Aug. 6.
MAS wins almost 54% of seats
The Corte Nacional Electoral (CNE) released official results for the July 2 vote for the Asamblea Constituyente on July 11, confirming that MAS received 50.7% of the vote. That result handed 137 seats to Morales' party, giving it 53.7% of the total seats. Fifteen other political groups won at least one representative in the assembly. Assembly delegates represent different districts, meaning there is not an exact proportional equivalence between the number of votes won and the number of representatives.
The CNE reported that MAS got 1,322,656 votes, more than triple the votes won by the conservative alliance Poder Democratico y Social (Podemos), the party of former President Jorge Quiroga Ramirez (2001-2002). Podemos came in second with 399,668 votes, representing 15.3% of the total and winning 60 assembly seats, 23.5% of the total.
In third place was Unidad Nacional (UN), the party of cement magnate Samuel Doria Medina, with 187,706 votes, or 7.2%. The UN will have eight seats in the assembly.
The numbers closely resembled the outcome of the 2005 presidential election, where Morales trounced Quiroga and Doria Medina by a similar margin (see NotiSur, 2006-01-06).
Three other political organizations will also each have eight assembly delegates. Although they received fewer votes than the UN, they will have the same number of representatives since they won in small districts. Those three forces are the formerly all-powerful Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR), the alliance between the MNR and the Frente Revolucionario de Izquierda (FRI), and the Movimiento Bolivia Libre (MBL).
The citizens' group representing evangelical churches, Concertacion Nacional, won six assembly seats with 93,248 votes, or 3.5% of the total.
The vote count left MAS and Podemos looking for alliances with the...
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