The result, which was a vindication to Evo Morales’s MAS party, also gave majorities in both houses of Congress.
Leftist leader Luis Arce has won a smashing victory in Bolivia’s presidential election, a final official vote count released on Friday shows, providing vindication for the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party of overthrown President Evo Morales.
The Supreme Electoral Tribunal announced Arce won 55 percent of the votes against six rivals on the ballot, easily avoiding the need for a runoff.
The runner-up was centrist former President Carlos Mesa with just less than 29 percent.
Conservative Luis Fernando Camacho, one of the leaders of the protest movement that helped drive Morales out of the country a year ago, received only 14 percent of the vote.
MAS also won majorities in both houses of Congress, though that fell short of the two-thirds majorities it would need to modify the constitution without consent by opposition parties.
Arce served as economy minister for a dozen years under Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, as the country’s mineral exports boomed and poverty was sharply reduced.
Since winning the election, Arce has downplayed speculation of a major role in his administration for Morales, whose popularity was dented in his final years as president by a refusal to accept term limits and by perceived growing authoritarianism.
Last year’s presidential election was annulled after disputed claims of fraud sparked widespread protests.
The political convulsion that preceded and followed Morales’s resignation – at the prompting of the military – led to at least 36 deaths.
The new election was organised by a revamped electoral tribunal under a deeply conservative interim government that had tried to reverse many of Morales’s economic, cultural and foreign policies. It suffered economic setbacks in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Morales, who faces a series of charges lodged by the interim administration, was barred from seeking office. He has been living in self-exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
