A political outsider broadcasting live from his secondhand clothing stand at a market in Santa Cruz, in Bolivia’s eastern lowlands, could unexpectedly find himself as the country’s vice president. 

Former police captain Edman Lara, 39, commands a huge TikTok following, and is credited with helping presidential candidate Rodrigo Paz Pereira into first place in Bolivia’s presidential elections on Sunday.

Running for the Christian Democratic Party (PDC, by its Spanish initials), the pair secured 32% of the vote. 

Paz and Lara are now headed to an October 19 run-off against right-wing former President Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, of the Alianza Libre party, who got 27%.

“From vertigo to surprise” is how Gerson Rivero, journalist and director of the Ruido Blanco streaming channel, describes the popular response to the result. Lara’s style, in particular, is closest to the tastes and interests of the popular majority, he said. 

Polls indicated Quiroga would compete with businessman Samuel Doria Medina, of the Unidad party, in the country’s first-ever presidential runoff election. But that wasn’t the case. It’s not unusual for poll results to fall wide of the mark in Bolivia — but analysts were not expecting that popular vote to break for Paz. 

“The calculation wasn’t being done with the right tools,” said Cristián León, political scientist and director of the nonprofit Internet Bolivia. “It was thought that this hidden popular vote was inevitably ideological, that it was MAS-supporting, and that it would end with Andrónico.”

A last-minute vice president

Paz was abandoned by his vice presidential running-mate the day before the deadline to submit candidacies. He turned to Lara at the last minute, a strategy that led him to victory. 

The PDC is a right-wing party that advocates for “popular capitalism,” in contrast with Quiroga’s appeals to the elite, according to Luciana Jauregui, a sociologist with a doctorate in political science from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Paz brings a religious, nationalist, and integrationist discourse and represents a renewal between the traditional left and right — although Paz himself comes from that traditional background, León explained. A senator for the southern department of Tarija, the 57-year-old is the son of former president Jaime Paz Zamora, who ruled the country between 1989 and 1993.

Lara first became famous for denouncing corruption in the Bolivian police, which led to his removal from the force in 2024. His style reached the masses: while Quiroga’s candidate for vice president used to show how Bolivian government limits on dollar transactions stopped him from paying for his garage in Miami by credit card, Lara — known as Captain Lara to his followers — makes a living as an informal trader, travels by public minibus, and lives in the working-class periphery of Santa Cruz. In his live streams, he would question figures in power, invoking issues of justice.

Now, Lara is promising major reforms to fight corruption in the police force. His tone is similar to that of El Salvador’s security hardliner President Nayib Bukele, whom he admires. That similarity appears to have resonated with the new generations, making waves in popular culture through digital means. 

New faces in Bolivia’s congress

That is how the PDC, a traditional right-wing party that’s been around for 40 years, managed to secure 16 senators and 46 deputies. However, that doesn’t mean the entire slate of assembly members is like its presidential candidates. Across all parties, most incoming senators are relatively unknown and lack a presence on social media. “For better or worse, there are few actors with parliamentary experience,” said Rivero, the journalist.

Paz will have to negotiate constantly to advance his agenda, according to Jauregui. The outgoing left-wing MAS party had a majority, but the new Congress is plural and fragmented, with no solid majorities to guarantee governability. However, it is not polarized: the incoming senators’ political center of gravity sits between the center and the right, and they share a common project. 

Quiroga will have 12 senators and 37 deputies. His briefcase also contains a constitutional reform ready for approval. His proposals involve abolishing communal lands, which has put Bolivia’s Indigenous resistance on alert; seeking financial help from the International Monetary Fund; and re-establishing relations with Israel. 

Among his ranks is Branko Marinkovic, an agroindustrial businessman with several conflicts during the MAS government. He faced legal action for a land grab in which he allegedly took over the Laguna Corazón, a lake on communal land. Marinkovic was also acused of terrorism and spent almost a decade in exile, only returning during Jeanine Añez’s interim government. “He boasts of his closeness to [former Brazilian leader Jair] Bolsonaro and [Argentine President Javier] Milei,” adds Rivero. “He has a certain popularity in the east, but much backlash in the west.”

Doria Medina’s Unidad party will have six senators and 28 deputies, and Cochabamba mayor Manfred Reyes Villa’s APB-Súmate party will have one senator and six deputies. Andronico Rodriguez’s party Alianza Popular, get five deputies, and MAS will have one deputy. 

Of the presidential hopefuls, Doria Medina has the largest social media following. He and Quiroga both splashed out on  campaign spending across the networks. But likes weren’t enough. Paz Pereira and Lara’s campaign spent virtually nothing on advertising — fact checking site Bolivia Verifica puts the figure for Paz’s Facebook campaign at 200 bolivianos (US$29). “The virality of organic content is what actually converts into votes. The rest is fictitious,” said León. 

It’s the end of an era in which politics is defined in terms of standing for or against MAS — but that doesn’t mean the left is dead, agree Rivero, Jauregui, and León. Evo Morales is consolidating his position as the leader of a block that controls governability on the streets, Jauregui said. 

Morales and the spoiled ballot campaign

The three-term leftist former president, who was unable to run in these elections, called on his followers to spoil their ballots — with some degree of success. The 20% of spoiled votes was well above the previous election’s figure of 3,5%. “Morales’s calculation is to articulate all the social unrest resulting from the consequences of austerity measures,” Jauregui said. 

Faced with an economic crisis, whoever wins the election is likely to cut down on government spending, including costly subsidies on goods such as fuel — moves that are unlikely to be popular with voters. 

Morales has said that the next government will not last long due to social pressure, an apparent threat to mobilize his followers against such proposals. However, there is a significant anti-Evo movement, and he has struggled to form these demands into a coherent movement beyond the Chapare-region coca growers who form his loyalist base.

The citizen vote expressed a rejection of the old structures and a search for fresh alternatives. Rivero suggests that those who come to power intend to erase much of the MAS legacy under the pretext of solving the economic crisis by downsizing the state to reduce the fiscal deficit. 

Many Bolivians have pinned their hopes of a resolution to the economic crisis on the elections, according to Jauregui. But, she added, some studies have predicted an increase in fragmented sectoral conflicts in the face of an economic crisis that is likely to get worse before it gets better.