Elecciones 2020 is an interactive map showing the results of Sunday's presidential election in Bolivia. In the election the left-wing Mas party manged to win an overall majority, meaning that Luis Arce will become the country's next President.
Polling Stations on the map are colored to show the winning candidate. The blue colored markers show where Luis Arce, the Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas) candidate won the most votes. The other colors represent where the right-wing parties gained the most votes. The size of the markers appear to reflect the number of citizens who voted at each polling station.
The convincing win by Mas in Sunday's election is quite a turn around in fortunes for the party. Less than a year ago, in November 2019, Evo Morales was overthrown in a right-wing military coup. The coup, supported by the USA, proved to be disastrous for the country and the right-wing evangelical President Jeanine Áñez has been widely criticized for her handling of the country's Covid-19 response.
Under Morales the Mas party had reduced poverty in the country from 60% to 35%. This had been brought about partly through the quasi-nationalism of the country's natural gas companies. A move which managed to vastly increase Bolivia's state revenues.
The Mas party's support for the poor seems to have been repaid during the 2020 election. What is apparent from the map is that although Mas managed to win a landslide majority in the Bolivian election the party is most popular in the western poorer part of the country. According to the map Mas appears to be less popular in the richer eastern part of Bolivia. Many of the richer provinces in east Bolivia are home to the eastern cambas (European-descended Bolivians) - many of whom seem to still support the country's right-wing parties. However Mas has huge support among the majority indigenous population.
I am an anarchist. For those who don't know the reality in Bolivia, the political party MAS is also right-wing, capitalist and stractivist; the name is the only thing that is socialist. The international press only repeats the discourse of coup to spread controversial (fake) news without depth or context. Evo fled from Bolivia because he made proven electoral fraud.
ReplyDeleteThe map intends to show the political polarization of the rural vote against the urban vote. The color different from blue is for a majority of a center political party (but also votes for a right-wing party).
The map has a visualization error because it doesn't weight the number of votes in big cities, the data is shown in the order of the number of polling stations. Bolivia is a country of thousands of villages and few big cities; big cities have 70% of the population.