One of the frontrunners in Bolivia’s upcoming presidential election, Jorge Quiroga, said that the country was poised for “radical change” after two decades of socialist rule marked in recent years by a severe economic crisis.
Quiroga, who served as president from 2001 to 2002, is running a close second behind business magnate Samuel Doria Medina in polls for the first round of the election on Aug. 17.
The ruling Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), founded by three-term former Bolivian president Evo Morales, is shown at rock bottom, with voters poised to punish the party over its handling of the worst crisis in two decades.
Photo: AFP
Basics like fuel and food items are in short supply in the Andean nation, which is running out of the dollars it needs to import essentials.
After a rally on Thursday with supporters in the administrative capital, La Paz, Quiroga, 65, said that Bolivians faced a period of “radical change [to] regain 20 lost years” — a reference to the Morales era from 2006 to 2019 and that of his successor, Luis Arce, who has been in power since 2020.
Referring to MAS, which was credited with lifting many Bolivians out of poverty during a commodities boom in the 2000s, Quiroga said: “Its cycle is over, its time is up.”
Quiroga, Doria Medina and Bolivian Senator Andronico Rodriguez, who is polling in third, have all prescribed varying degrees of austerity to turn around Bolivia’s finances.
Quiroga, a supporter of Argentine President Javier Milei, has advocated the deepest spending cuts.
Year-on-year inflation rose to 25.8 percent last month, the highest level since 2008, driven by a shortage of dollars, with the US currency having nearly doubled in value against the local boliviano in a year.
Quiroga, a US-educated former finance minister who served as vice president under former Bolivian president Hugo Banzer in the 1990s, said that if elected, he would “change all the laws” to attract investment, including in the energy sector, which Morales nationalized in the 2000s.
He also vowed a change in international alliances, breaking from Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua — close allies of the Morales and Arce administrations.
Quiroga was the youngest vice president in Bolivia’s history when he was elected to the post in 1997 at the age of 37. He later served as president for one year after Banzer resigned in August 2001 due to cancer.
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