Sunday’s election marked the first time since 2005 that no candidate from Evo Morales’ Mas party was on the ballot
Centre-right senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira, 58, won Bolivia’s presidential runoff on Sunday and will be the country’s next president, marking a shift to the right after nearly 20 years of dominance by the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas) party.
With just over 97% of ballots counted in the electoral court’s “preliminary” tally, Paz Pereira secured 54.6% of the vote, while rightwing former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga received 45.4%.
The electoral court stressed that the figures are “preliminary and not definitive”. That is because Bolivia uses two counts: a quicker one, based on photos of each ballot sent to a data-processing centre, and the slower definitive one, in which every vote is publicly counted and scrutinised at polling stations before entering the system.
The court has up to seven days to release the official results.
