Media Contact
Adam Allington
Ex-president Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga and Senator Rodrigo Paz will go head-to-head in Bolivia's presidential run-off Sunday, with either likely to shift the nation's politics significantly to the right.
This comes after nearly 20 years under former president Evo Morales and his socialist Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party. When Bolivia held its first-round presidential vote in August, Morales was controversially not allowed on the ballot.
Santiago Anria
Associate Professor of global labor and work
Santiago Anria, a professor of global labor and work, recently published “Why Bolivia’s MAS Collapsed” in Journal of Democracy.
Anria says:
“MAS was in some ways an unusual feature in Latin American politics. It was a fairly remarkable development, starting as a social movement, as a small organization, and was able to tie together all sorts of groups with similar, yet distinct, grievances and demands into a unified political front.
“Across Latin America, the legacy of the so-called left-turn movements (like MAS) that began in the 1990s has become increasingly contested. Political parties and movements that once sought to deepen democracy now struggle to adapt to shifting political and economic conditions. In some cases, this has led to outright democratic erosion and increasingly authoritarian rule.”
