The interim president of Bolivia recognizes the victory of Luis Arce in the first round of the elections | World

“We still do not have the official count, but from the data we have access to, Mr. Arce and Mr. Choquehuanca won the elections,” Añez wrote on a social network. “Greetings to the winners and I ask that they govern with Bolivia and democracy in mind.”

However, the official result of the elections on Sunday (18) should take time to be published. Until the last update of this report, less than 16% of the polls had been cleared.

A poll by the organization Tu Voto Cuenta shows Arce, from MAS, with 53% of the votes, compared to 30.8% for former president Carlos Mesa and 14.1% for far-right leader Luis Fernando Camacho. The rest of the candidates appear with less than 2%.

The Ciesmori Institute survey points to Arce with 52.4%, Mesa with 31.5% and Camacho with 14.1%. In the poll, the other candidates also have less than 2% of the vote.

Even without the official result, Arce already celebrated the victory in the elections. “I am very grateful for the support and trust of the Bolivian people. We have recovered democracy and we will regain stability and social peace,” he posted on his Twitter page.

In Argentina, former President Evo Morales also used the social network to congratulate the ally. “Brothers and sisters, the will of the people prevailed. It was an overwhelming victory,” he wrote.

The result can It will take more than a day to be known, because the Superior Electoral Court decided to eliminate the preliminary count system and keep only the individual count, much slower.

In the 2019 elections, it was precisely the adoption of the two parallel systems that caused confusion, when the numbers of the Preliminary Election Results Transmission system, called Trep, began to differ from the individual vote count.

This Sunday’s vote took place in a peaceful atmosphere and ended smoothly at 5 pm (6 pm in Brasilia).

Voters voted to choose who will replace Jeanine Añez, the interim president who took office in November 2019, after that year’s vote was canceled and the riots that led to the resignation of Evo Morales.

They were the first elections in Bolivia without Evo Morales since 1997.

The election can be decided in the first round if one of the candidates has at least 40% of the valid votes and more than ten percentage points more than the second. If no one achieves this result, a second round is scheduled for November 29.

To avoid the problems of last year, groups linked to foundations and universities have observed the polling places, according to Juan Carlos Nunes, of the Jubilee Foundation, a Catholic foundation to promote democracy in the country.

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