'Capitalism for All!' May Win in Bolivia.

The socialists have lost the Bolivian presidency for the first time in 20 years. Incredibly, the higher vote total ahead of the runoff went to a candidate, Rodrigo Paz, who is running with the slogan Capitalism for All!

That the socialists lost may be the full extent of the good news, as one may glean from the rest of the story.

First of all, it will be too easy for the socialists -- who are dismissing the win as a protest vote -- to elude blame since they were using commodity prices to prop up the economy of this small country:

But much as it did under his leftist Latin American contemporaries at the start of this century, government spending under Morales depended on an influx of cash from the global commodities boom. Everything changed after prices for Bolivia's main export, natural gas, plummeted. Gas exports declined, imports rose, and the central bank began running out of dollars. Bolivia, which once supplied half of its own diesel fuel, produced only 12 percent by 2023.

In recent months, Bolivians have been forced to sleep in their cars to wait to fill their tanks amid widespread fuel shortages. Inflation, which until 2023 was controlled at 2 percent, was more than 16 percent in July. Those who depend on government-subsidized food products have had to form long lines to buy bread. [bold added]

And then there's the matter of whether one believes Paz is really a capitalist, or is just trying to ride Javier Milei's coattails:

For many voters, Paz may represent "a new kind of politics, even though it's just his father's politics but from a younger generation," said Santiago Anria, a political scientist at Cornell University who has written extensively about Bolivia. Paz, perhaps more than Quiroga and Medina, sought to connect with the working class and the informal sector, particularly with the campaign slogan "capitalism for all." He may have also received a boost from evangelical communities, Anria said. [bold and link to article on Victor Paz Estensso added]

It will be interesting to see if Paz is, in fact, just another right-winger or if he learns from (or even does a halfway decent imitation of) Milei.

To the degree Paz is the former, he may well just set the table for the socialists again, perhaps after a slightly better/less bad economic turn. To the degree he is the latter, conditions stand to improve sharply in Bolivia, and the chances rise that the socialists will be discredited for the foreseeable future, opening a window for more lasting positive cultural change.

-- CAV