Rodrigo Paz wins presidential runoff, becoming Bolivia's first conservative leader in decades

Rodrigo Paz, a centrist senator, will be Bolivia’s next president, preliminary results showed on Monday, paving the way for a major political transformation after almost 20 years of rule by the Movement Toward Socialism party and during the nation’s worst economic crisis in decades.

“The trend is irreversible,” Óscar Hassenteufel, the president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, said of Paz's lead over his rival, former right-wing President Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga. Paz won 54.5% of the votes, early results showed, versus Quiroga's 45.5%.

Paz and his popular running mate, ex-police Capt. Edman Lara, galvanized working-class and rural voters outraged over record inflation and an acute dollar shortage that has sapped food and fuel supplies.

But for all their disillusionment with the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party, Bolivian voters seemed skeptical of Quiroga’s radical 180-degree turn away from the MAS-style social protections and toward an International Monetary Fund bailout.

Riven by internal divisions and battered by public anger over the economic crisis, MAS suffered a historic defeat in the Aug. 17 elections that propelled Quiroga and Paz to the runoff.

Paz’s victory sets this South American nation of 12 million on a sharply uncertain path as he seeks to enact major change for the first time since the 2005 election of Evo Morales, the founder of MAS and Bolivia’s first Indigenous president.

Although Paz’s Christian Democratic Party has the cushion of a slight majority in Congress, he’ll still need to compromise to push through an ambitious overhaul.

Paz plans to end Bolivia’s fixed exchange rate, phase out generous fuel subsidies and reduce hefty public investment, redrawing much of the MAS economic model that has dominated Bolivia for two decades.

But he says he’ll take a gradual approach to free-market reforms, in hopes of avoiding a sharp recession or jump in inflation that would enrage the masses — as has happened before in Bolivia. Morales’ effort to lift fuel subsidies in 2011 lasted less than a week as protests engulfed the country.

Paz’s supporters erupted into raucous cheers and ran into the streets of La Paz, Bolivia's capital, setting off fireworks and honking car horns. Crowds descended around the downtown hotel where Paz declared victory. Some shouted, “The people, united, will never be defeated!”

“Today, Bolivia can be certain that this will be a government that will bring solutions,” Paz said, flanked by his wife and four adult children.

Shortly after the results came in, Quiroga conceded to Paz.

“I’ve called Rodrigo Paz and wished him congratulations,” he said in a somber speech, prompting jeers and cries of fraud from the audience. But Quiroga urged calm, saying that a refusal to recognize the results would “leave the country hanging.”

“We'd just exacerbate the problems of people suffering from the crisis,” he said. “We need a mature attitude right now.”

For the first time in years, the U.S. State Department congratulated the Bolivian president-elect and said it was looking forward to working with Bolivia to “restore economic stability, expand private-sector growth and strengthen security.”

Tensions have simmered between the nations ever since Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador in 2008 and the Drug Enforcement Administration in 2009. Paz has vowed to rebuild Bolivia's relations with Washington.

Behind the celebrations, Bolivia faces an uphill battle. To make it through even his first months, Paz must replenish the country’s meager foreign currency reserves and get fuel imports flowing.

Since 2023, the Andean nation has been crippled by a shortage of U.S. dollars that has locked Bolivians out of their own savings. Year-on-year inflation soared to 23% last month, the highest rate since 1991. Fuel shortages paralyze the country, with motorists often waiting days in line to fill up their tanks.

Vowing to avoid the IMF, Paz has pledged to scrape together the necessary cash by fighting corruption, reducing wasteful spending and restoring enough confidence in the country's currency to lure U.S. dollar savings out from under Bolivians' mattresses and into the banking system.