President Evo Morales. La Paz. Bolivia. José Luis Quintana/Getty Images. All rights reserved.
Evo Morales placed himself in what seemed to be, from the start, the most difficult election for his administration, after a decade-long string of overwhelming electoral triumphs. As if electoral “abstinence” were an unbearable situation for a leader who needs constant approval from the masses, the Bolivian president launched a referendum to enable him to run for a fourth term, at a time when he has still four years to go to finish the third. The government that drew up the new state constitution that laid the foundations of the Bolivian Plurinational State in 2009 decided to amend it, six years after it was passed. The question that was submitted to the voters was: Do you agree with the reform of article 168 of the State Constitution, allowing the President and the Vice-president to be re-elected twice in two consecutive terms?
The first obvious challenge a referendum of this nature poses is that it unites all the opposition around the No option. From racists who never wanted a farmer-indigenous government to those who criticise it for the exact opposite - that is, for not being a true indigenous government, but an ersatz emanating from a “whitish” matrix, or for being blatantly anti-indigenous -, the No coalition amalgamated a vote that would have never united behind a common candidate. This is understandable and in no way disqualifies the reasons for the vote, but it clarifies certain readings of the results that, as happens often in these cases, try to see them in a one-dimensional way. Montesquieu did not resurrect in the Andes, nor was the Empire’s black-hand behind it all, nor did the ancestral Buen vivir (good living, or living well) awake the Andean deities to avenge Evo’s neo-developmentalist populism.
