LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — The campaign billboards adorning the streets of Bolivia for Sunday’s presidential election make grand promises: A solution to the dire economic crisis within 100 days, an end to fuel shortages and bread lines, unity for a divided nation. One vice presidential candidate pledges to “Make Bolivia Sexy Again.”
In their efforts to draw votes, all eight candidates — two right-wing front-runners, a conservative centrist and splintered factions of Bolivia’s long-dominant left-wing — are vowing drastic change, launching searing attacks on the status quo and selling a message of hope.
But for many Bolivians, hope has already hardened into cynicism.
Slogans fail to break through
Promises of quick fixes — like right-wing candidate Samuel Doria Medina’s pledge to stabilize the upside-down economy within “100 days, dammit!” — fall flat. Vandals add extra zeroes to his campaign posters, suggesting a million days might be a more realistic goal.
Tuto, the nickname of Jorge Quiroga, the other right-wing favorite, turns up on city walls with its first letter swapped to form a Spanish insult.
Some signs for left-wing candidate Andrónico Rodríguez, pledging “unity above all” have been defaced to read “unity in the face of lines.”
And few know what to do with the acronym of the governing party candidate, Eduardo del Castillo: “We Are a National Option with Authentic Ideas.” (No, It’s not any catchier in Spanish).
Yet for all their disenchantment with politicians, Bolivians are counting down the days until elections, united in their relief that, no matter what happens, leftist President Luis Arce will leave office after five difficult years.
Inflation is soaring. The central bank has burned through its dollar reserves. Imported goods have vanished from shelves.
“I have no faith in any candidate. There’s no one new in this race,” Alex Poma Quispe, 25, told The Associated Press from his family’s fruit truck, where he slept curled into a ball in the front seat Wednesday for a second straight night, stranded with 50 other trucks in a fuel line en route from farms in the Yungas region to markets in Bolivia’s capital of La Paz.
“The only thing we’re enthusiastic about is Arce leaving.”
New campaigns, old faces
A bitter power struggle between Arce and former President Evo Morales has shattered their hegemonic Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party, giving the right-wing opposition its best shot at victory in two decades.
“I’ve seen that socialism has brought nothing good to this country,” said Victor Ticona, 24, a music student, as he left Quiroga’s campaign rally Wednesday. “We have to become more competitive in the world.”
Doria Medina, a 66-year-old multimillionaire businessman, and Quiroga, a 65-year-old former vice president who briefly assumed the presidency in 2001 after then-President Hugo Banzer resigned with cancer, are familiar faces in Bolivian politics. Both have run for president three times before.
While their calls for economic freedom and foreign investment appeal to voters desperate for change, they have struggled to stir up excitement. Nearly 30% of voters are undecided, according to polls.
Doria Medina, a former minister of planning, acknowledged in a recent social media video that “people say I have no charisma, that I’m too serious.”
Quiroga’s association with Banzer, a former military dictator who brutally quashed dissent over seven corruption-plagued years before being democratically elected, has turned some voters off.
“It was a bloody era,” recalled 52-year-old taxi driver Juan Carlos Mamani. “For me, Tuto is the definition of the old guard.”
At the pumps, not the polls
Poma Quispe and his 24-year-old brother Weimar have no idea who’d they vote for — or if they’ll vote at all.
Voting is compulsory in Bolivia, and about 7.9 million people in the country of 12 million are eligible to cast ballots in Sunday’s election. Non-voters face various financial penalties.
Over the past year, fuel shortages have brought much of Bolivia to a standstill. Truckers waste days at a time queuing at empty gas stations around Bolivia, just to keep their vehicles moving.
The diesel arrives on no set schedule, and the rhythm of life is forced to adapt. If the diesel arrives before Sunday, the Poma Quispe brothers will vote.
If not, “there’s no way we’re giving up our spot in line for those candidates,” Weimar Poma Quispe said.
Personal drama over political debate
This year’s election coincides with the 200th anniversary of Bolivia’s independence.
But instead of celebrating, many Bolivians are questioning the validity of their democracy and state-directed economic model. Crowds booed at President Arce during his bicentennial speech earlier this month. His government invited left-wing presidents from across Latin America to attend the event; only the president of Honduras showed.
The lack of enthusiasm among ordinary Bolivians and beleaguered officials seems matched by that of the candidates.
Authorities allowed televised presidential debates — banned under Morales — for the first time in 20 years. The front-runners turned up to just one of them.
Personal attacks overshadowed policy discussions. Doria Medina accused Del Castillo of ties to drug traffickers, while Del Castillo mocked the businessman’s record of failed presidential bids. Rodríguez and Quiroga traded barbs over alleged involvement in extrajudicial killings.
Chasing the youth vote
The median age in Bolivia is 26. For comparison, it is 39 in China and the United States.
Having grown up under the government of Morales and his MAS party, many young Bolivians are restive, disillusioned by current prospects as they become more digitally connected than any generation before them.
Quiroga in particular has energized young voters with his running mate, JP Velasco, a successful 38-year-old tech entrepreneur with no political experience who vows to reverse a brain drain in Bolivia and create opportunities for youth in exploiting the country’s abundant reserves of lithium, the critical metal for electric vehicle batteries, and developing data centers.
Young crowds packed Quiroga’s Wednesday night campaign rally, even as 20-somethings in goth makeup and tight-stretch dresses expressed more interest in the lively cumbia bands than the political speeches.
Others sported red MAGA-style caps with Velasco’s slogan, “Make Bolivia Sexy Again.” Cap-wearers offered varying answers on when Bolivia was last “sexy,” with some saying never, but agreed it meant attractive to foreign investors.
“It won’t just be tech companies coming here, McDonald’s might even come,” Velasco told the crowd, eliciting whoops and howls. “Young people, if you go abroad, let it be for vacation.”
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