Late last month, Bolivia’s transitional government decided to postpone elections yet again, propelling the country into its most profound political crisis in decades.

The most popular party — the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) — has been repeatedly denied its right to govern. The MAS won Bolivia’s last four elections by historic margins: 54-29 percent in 2005, 64-27 percent in 2009, 61-21 percent in 2014, and 47-37 percent in 2019. Current polls point to the socialist party securing another easy victory in 2020 of 42-27 percent.

This latter performance is striking, given the Right’s previous assumption — shared by many within the MAS — that the Left would collapse without its ousted former president, Evo Morales, who remains politically active from his Argentine exile. Moreover, despite Morales’s 2019 victory having been marred by dubious claims of fraud from a hostile Organization of American States (OAS), mainstream opinion is finally coming around to the realization that the US-funded organization’s insinuations of electoral misconduct last fall — based on discredited statistical analysis — were errant, either by incompetence or design.