Eleven months after being removed from power, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) took revenge on Sunday, October 18 in Bolivia. The party of ex-president Evo Morales won hands down and in the first round its candidate, Luis Arce, with more than 20 points ahead of his right-wing rival, Carlos Mesa. Former Minister of the Economy, Luis Arce is also assured of having a majority in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. The president-elect, who is expected to take office in mid-November, received The world two days after the poll, Tuesday October 20, in La Paz.
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Are there divisions within the MAS over the role that Evo Morales, now in forced exile in Argentina, should play in the future?
We haven’t discussed it. There is not a single, monolithic position. This is not a subject that concerns us. Evo is no longer president of the country, but he has a role: he is the president of the party, he is the historical and indisputable leader of the process. Nobody is going to take away from Evo the role he had, especially international. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to rule. The one who will govern is me.
You said that we should not repeat the mistakes that were made during the government of Evo Morales. What are they ?
In our first government, social organizations [paysannes, ouvrières, syndicales, indigènes, féministes…] played a role that was not central. The MAS as a political party did not have much importance within the government either. The MAS was just one more political tool. We want to give social organizations and the MAS more weight. We also want to include in the management and decision-making certain sectors of society that seem important to us: professionals, young people. We want to be a version 2.0, more inclusive. Thus, the MAS will constantly create new leaderships, new figures, renew itself, while maintaining the principles of the party. Another mistake was to think that the magistrates had to be elected. We were wrong. For more transparency, we are obliged to reform the justice system.
You will inherit a catastrophic economic situation, especially after the pandemic caused by the coronavirus, very different from when you were Minister of the Economy. How do you plan to go about it?
When I arrived at the Ministry of Economy in 2006, the country was also bankrupt. We had to work hard to achieve the good results we had. It was not thanks to the boom in the price of raw materials, as the right wing claims, but thanks to courageous economic measures such as the nationalization of hydrocarbons. What good would good commodity prices have served us if the money had gone elsewhere? The first thing we are going to do now is take back our social economic model, which the outgoing government has rejected since November 2019 by applying a neoliberal model. Our model generates income through natural resources that are redistributed among all Bolivians. It increases the internal market, it improves the quality of life, it reduces poverty and unemployment, it reduces the gap between rich and poor.
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