The victory of Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo coalition in the Bolivian presidential and legislative elections on 18 December 2005, after five years of tumultuous mass protests against Washington-backed privatization and coca eradication programmes, opens a new period in the country’s history. In electoral terms, it would be hard to exaggerate the significance of the result. Whereas successful Bolivian presidential candidates usually score below 25 per cent of the popular vote, and none has ever topped 37 per cent, Morales and his vice-president Álvaro García Linera have won 54 per cent, on a turnout of 85 per cent. They carried all the cities except the right-wing stronghold of Santa Cruz, and even took 33 per cent to the Right’s 42 per cent in Santa Cruz Department, thanks in large part to García’s months of campaigning there, and despite the disqualification of hundreds of thousands of voters on a technicality. Morales is the first Bolivian president ever to have been accorded an absolute majority. In the only country in the western hemisphere in which the bulk of the population identifies itself as indigenous, he is the first indigenous head of state.
The question as to whether a Morales–García government will follow the Lula or the Chávez path—willing subordination to global capital, or robust populist reformism along the lines of Bolivarian social democracy—though pertinent, ignores the distinctiveness of Bolivia’s developmental path and its long-standing insurrectionary traditions. mas itself is not so much a party, in the accepted sense of the term, as a coalition of personalist factions, with that of Morales exercising unquestioned supremacy; it has none of the bureaucratic infrastructure of the Brazilian pt, for example. Formed to represent the coca-growers of Chapare in the 1998 elections, mas only broke through onto the national stage in 2002, when Morales, the cocaleros’ charismatic union leader, was just beaten by Sánchez de Lozada for the presidency by 23 to 21 per cent, and mas became the second largest grouping in the Chamber of Deputies.