General elections will take place in December

Apologies for not having written for a little while; I have had too many distractions lately.

For those of you who haven’t been following Bolivian politics in the last couple of months, you might not know that the approval through referendum last January of a new Constitution established that general elections would take place on December 6. This would give the current president, if he wins, one final term in office instead of the two the new constitution establishes. The acceptance of only one term was one of the last minute compromises Evo Morales had to make back in October in order to unblock the opposition’s refusal to let the constitutional referendum take place.

Now we come to another attempt to paralyse congress. For any public consultation to take place, Congress (or the now renamed plurinational assembly) has to enact a law calling for such consultation. But, as has now become customary, the opposition have dug their heels and refused to support the law, reaching the point of walking out of congress last week. The reasons are many but the real intention has always been to make the country as ungovernable as possible preventing, if possible, the elections from taking place.

Two are the main reasons why the opposition wouldn’t approve the law calling for elections in December. The first is that the law would give the vote to the various millions of Bolivians living abroad, a process that would take place through the embassies. The accusation from the opposition is that, the embassies being the institutional representatives of the state, would not guarantee the lack of electoral fraud. What? What other institution can possibly administer the electoral process abroad? I’ve always gone to my embassy…In any case, support abroad is the only hope the opposition has of denting the government’s majority so why oppose it, I wonder. But that’s another matter.

The second reason is that according to them the electoral roll is inaccurate and therefore a tool that permits the government to commit fraud. It is interesting that fraud is an accusation one constantly hears from the opposition when every single legal popular consultation since the election of Evo Morales has had international observers and been declared clean and fair. This, by the way, is more than can be said for previous elections and for the illegal autonomic consultations that took place in a number of opposition departments last year where the president of the civic committee of Santa Cruz is well known for his remarks about how in Santa Cruz they didn’t need any foreigners telling them how to organise a referendum. Fraud? Most definitely.

Back to the electoral roll. It is obvious that there are mistakes in it like in all of them but an audit commissioned by the electoral court to the Organisation of American States last year determined that Bolivia’s roll is 97 % accurate and as such, the best in Latin America. Yet, the only possible way out of this crisis has been for the president, who had joined the social movements in a hunger strike demanding that congress gives the people of Bolivia the right to go to the polls, to divert funds earmarked for a presidential plane to the creation of a new biometric electoral roll for the 4.3 million Bolivians with the right to vote.

So why the opposition? The answer has to be the same as always. This country’s opposition is an obstacle to democratic practice, not a guarantor of it. The opposition belongs to a different political era where votes could be bought and public office was a way to self-enrichment. The opposition’s strategy is not to shape or contribute to the process of change in Bolivia, it is to make the country as ungovernable as possible by any means necessary, including the paralysis of congress and the provocation of civil unrest, while denouncing as loudly as possible to any international institution that will listen, that the country is descending into dictatorship.

No wonder new graffiti near the house says “the electoral census is clean, the right is not”.