LA PAZ: Bolivia’s center-right senator Rodrigo Paz and right-wing former president Jorge Quiroga will face off in an October 19 runoff election after ending two decades of leftist rule, according to final results.
Paz won Sunday’s first round with 32% of valid votes, while Quiroga secured 26.7%, the election commission said Thursday after counting 100% of ballots.
Neither candidate achieved the required 50% of votes or 40% with a 10-point margin over their nearest rival, forcing Bolivia’s first presidential runoff since the mechanism was introduced in 2009.
The result brings the curtain down on 20 years of socialist rule, which began in 2005 when Evo Morales, an Indigenous coca farmer, was elected president on a radical anti-capitalist platform.
Millionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina, who had been tipped to finish first, trailed in third with 19.6%.
Doria Medina immediately threw his support behind Paz, as the leading opposition candidate.
The election took place amid Bolivia’s worst economic crisis in years, with inflation reaching nearly 25% year-on-year in July.
The main leftist candidate, Senate president Andronico Rodriguez, limped to a fourth-place finish with 8.5% of the vote.
Morales, who was barred from standing for an unconstitutional fourth term, cast a long shadow over the campaign.
Nearly one in five voters answered his call to spoil their ballot over his exclusion from the election, shrinking the left-wing vote.
Rodriguez, the main leftist candidate whom Morales branded a “traitor” for contesting the election, was stoned while voting in Morales central Cochabamba stronghold. – AFP
