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The final vote count confirmed Luis Arce of the Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) as the winner of the elections in Bolivia on Friday, after five days of scrutiny.
The count gives Arce 55.09 percent of the votes, over 50 percent plus one of the votes he needed to win in the first round.
Former President Carlos Mesa, from Comunidad Ciudadana, obtained 28.83 percent of the votes and Luis Fernando Camacho, from Creemos, 14.
Chi Hyun Chung of the Front for Victory got 1.55 of the vote and Feliciano Mamami of Pan-Bol got 0.52 percent, in both cases below the required 3 percent.
The final count confirms Luis Arce as president-elect of Bolivia, awaiting the formal proclamation that the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal has scheduled in the afternoon, at a ceremony in La Paz.
Arce was already recognized as the winner by Mesa, the interim government of Jeanine Áñez and a large part of the international community, while Camacho said he would wait for the final count.
The Creemos leader concentrates his vote in Santa Cruz, the largest and most populated region in Bolivia, as well as the country’s economic engine, where civic organizations with a significant social weight have announced that they will not recognize the result and have called a strike for this Saturday against what they consider electoral fraud.
The elections were held last Sunday with a roll of some 7.3 million voters and a turnout of 87 percent, with the vote being mandatory for residents in the country and voluntary abroad.
The electoral body has recognized the slowness of the count, having given priority to the certainty of the result over the speed of the count.
The elections to elect president, vice president, senators and deputies are repeated in Bolivia practically a year after those of October 20, 2019 were annulled between allegations of fraud in favor of then-President Evo Morales, who had been declared the winner for a fourth commanded followed and that he resigned, denouncing that he was forced to leave power by a coup d’état.
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