The Opposition Finally Finds Some Traction

Yesterday’s successful four-department general strike, by political opponents of the MAS government, makes it official that the opposition has finally found some political traction eight months into the Morales presidency. Morales and MAS deserve a good deal of the credit for helping them achieve it.

During his first three months in office, Morales could hardly have had a sweeter honeymoon, both in Bolivia and abroad. On his ascendancy to the presidency Evo went from being a roughly cut coca union leader to an international rock star. He embodied hope at home, and abroad he was wrapped in the imagery of new indigenous power. Even old foes offered kind words and promises of assistance. His popularity in Bolivia hovered at 80%. His detractors, both to his right and to his left, found little interest in their criticisms.

Soon afterwards the imagery of a new government gave way to the realities of governing and political choices. In came the Cuban doctors and Venezuelan oil advisors. Out went the soldiers to the oil fields for a photo-op of aggressiveness aimed at domestic politics, but that also played far more radically in the foreign press than the government might have strategically intended. Onward came elections for the Constituent Assembly to rewrite the nation’s constitution.

MAS opponents, led by Tuto Quiroga and PODEMOS, imagined they could find political traction in weeks of advertising featuring photos of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez and dire warnings that, essentially, any day Evo would start parading up and down the Prado in La Paz sporting a red beret and automatic rifle. The success of that political strategy by PODEMOS was measured in its trouncing at the Constituent Assembly polls in July, even worse than the drubbing MAS handed them in December.

Then Morales handed his domestic political opponents two excellent pieces of political red meat that on the one hand had real substance, and on the other played directly to the two political weaknesses that were always certain to be the new government’s Achilles heel. The first was that he would not be able to assemble a competent administration and the second was that Morales harbors an authoritarian streak.

In January he had put in charge of the state-owned oil corporation a genial friend, Jorge Alvarado, who had already well-established himself as a mediocre administrator when he took over Cochabamba’s public water company after the water revolt in 2000. Those qualities of administrative mediocrity caught up with the new government in August in the explosion of a scandal involving a government contract with a Brazilian firm. The opposition pounced, and Morales helped them with a week of rhetoric castigating his critics instead of dealing with the problem. Alvarado finally stepped down.

Morales’ opponents found their first real bite.

Then MAS played to that other perceived danger embodied in Evo, the authoritarian streak, by engineering a vote in the Constituent Assembly to make the voting along the path toward a new constitution subject to a simple majority vote (one MAS could dominate), while final approval would remain, as required by law, subject t a 2/3 vote that gave MAS opponents an effective veto power at the end.

Both sides have reasonable arguments – the need to not have political obstruction at every turn versus the demand for keeping the majority in check. Nevertheless, the opposition seized on the issue hard and that resistance culminated in the general strikes yesterday in Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija.

So what does all this mean?

First, it is important to see the resistance around the majority vote issue in the Assembly as a two-headed beast. On the one hand it is certainly a legitimate issue and I do not question the sincerity with which many in the opposition have taken to battle against it. On the other hand, given that PODEMOS and its allies continue to have a clear, unchallenged veto over the final product at the end, the fuss also has some hidden agendas as well.

If I were PODEMOS I would certainly not relish the prospect of having to use my minority vote in the Assembly to stop something that may well be a political freight train traveling with huge momentum at the end. Standing in front of such a force is not good politics. Ask Goni. Or, if alternatively a MAS-backed constitution proposal is put before the electorate for approval, PODEMOS is really unlikely to win there either. Aside from the “process” debate involved, opponents of MAS are simply more powerful if they can block proposals piece by piece and slow the process to a crawl. I also would not dismiss the charges that foreign oil firms and other outside interests have their hand in the slowing strategy as well.

MAS, for its part, looks like it will respond to yesterday’s strike the way it tried to respond at first to the opposition’s attack on the problems with its gas administration – attack the opposition. As several astute readers of this Blog have noted in recent weeks, this ironically has Evo taking a page from the political playbook of George W. Bush. That strategy, while tempting, is not likely to play any better in the Andes than it has in the USA.

All this is not great timing for Morales. He is headed later this month to New York, his first trip ever to the US, where he will address the UN General Assembly, hob nob with other heads of state and have an opportunity for another round of international media attention. The strikes assure that he will go north stripped of some of the rock star glow he hoped to have in full supply. I am sure his domestic opponents know that as well.

Morales and MAS are at their best when they focus both their rhetoric and their governing on the concrete tasks of lifting a poor nation out of poverty – something Evo’s predecessors never seemed to care much about and certainly did a miserable job of delivering. Morales and MAS are not at their best when they shift into hard-core political mode and offer the appearance that consolidating political power is really their deepest desire.

In politics the high ground is better, and rightly or wrongly, Morales and MAS are at risk of losing it.