Elections 2014: The First Potential Problems Surface

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The five political alliances taking part in the Bolivian general elections in October 2014 have officially submitted their list of candidates for the legislative to the electoral court. For more on this please see the prior post. This post is about the problems already arising from the submission of such lists.

To start of however, a bit of context. As you know, the Plurinational Bolivian State has a bicameral system with a higher chamber being the Senate and the lower chamber being the Chamber of Deputies. The Senate has a total of 36 seats, with four seats for each of the nine departments. The lower chamber has 130 seats, with half being filled by the proportional representation method and the other half with first-past-the-post method. This, so called, mixed member proportional representation method is seen as the most fair, and not only by Bolivia. 

Having said that, shortly after the different political organizations submitted their lists to the electoral organ, there were already people complaining about the process, in particular about how the lists were filled. The major complain across political organizations seems to be that the lists have been filled not by consensus but by designation of some people in higher posts. That is, for example, one complain within the MAS. One supporter from Santa Cruz complained the names already agreed upon in a locality in Santa Cruz had been changed by two leaders of the MAS. The supporter complained the statutes had been violated because a seniority rule was not respected. An additional complaint was about the number of persons invited to run under the MAS. These people have recently become members of MAS. This means that people who have been in the MAS for a long time and wanted to fill a position were taken out and were replaced by some other person who was recently invited by some MAS leader.

Similar complains echoed within the MSM, whereby this organization does not pretend to principally open up spaces for participation for indigenous people while the MAS does. However, the basic pattern of the problem is the distribution of spaces (in this case candidacy posts) among the various organizations allied. Following this logic, if one organization does not respect what has been agreed upon, the alliance may run the risk of falling apart. The case of the UD, is similar but with one distinction, namely the political group has tended to recycle politicians from the traditional political parties and the MAS renegades. But essentially the distribution of positions in the electoral lists has been the glue keeping together (even the MAS) these alliances.

Two things need to be highlighted when looking at the lists, which you can access in the electoral agency's website. There are a number of family members coming up within the lists of candidates. The most conspicuous are the nephew of Evo Morales and the sister of MSM Vicepresident candidate Adriana Gil, who will run for lower chamber seats. I did not look at the lists careful enough to see other cases of nepotism? but I would not be sure these were the only cases. The second thing to be highlighted is the number of women in the lists. I think Bolivia has made tremendous progress in the area of women representation in leading posts. A news report says women make up 52% of all the candidates in this election. We should add that a significant percent of these have a real chance to being elected because they are incumbents as opposed to just substitutes.