In 2008, the famous American political scientist Joel S. Migdal released a statement with an air of prophecy.
“As the 21st century progresses, the state will continue to take center stage, but the state’s difficulties in achieving compliance and obedience will only increase.”
The paradox was that this much-required state sought to dominate a society with strong tendencies to ignore its authority and, in some cases, the legitimacy of its governments.
At the end of 2019, there were “social explosions” in Chile, Ecuador and Bolivia that resulted in political crises.
In Chile, the government presided over by Sebastián Piñera had no option but to cancel the increase in the price of the subway ticket in Santiago.
In the case of Ecuador, President Lenín Moreno had to abandon his intention to eliminate the gasoline subsidy.
In Bolivia, massive urban protests caused by President Evo Morales’ insistence on remaining in power ended with his resignation and subsequent departure to Mexico.
However, there is something that distinguishes the Bolivian case: the MAS, despite the 2019 crisis and the resignation of Evo, was able to rebuild its party structures, organize its bases and achieve a resounding victory in the 2020 presidential elections with an absolute majority.
This is something that has not happened in Chile or Ecuador, where neither Piñera nor Moreno could reproduce their permanence in power.
Setback as a government logic
With this background, can one speak of governmental weakness in a government like that of Luis Arce, who won 55% of the votes plus 76 seats in Parliament, out of a possible 130? Moreover, when are opposition parties (almost) a caricature of a political party?
Certainly not. The resounding electoral triumph endowed the MAS government with an indisputable legitimacy, which, in theory, should lead it to implement its policies without major turmoil.
However, this is not the case.
So far, in this period, the government has had to backtrack on several policies, most notably the repeal of Law 1,386, against illicit greed and terrorist financing, a law that had already passed through all the filters of the Legislative Branch.
What is surprising is that opposition to this rule came from allied sectors of the government, such as transporters, unions and mining cooperatives, which, in addition to the anti-MAS speeches of their fellow conjunctural struggles, such as the citizens of Santa Cruz and Potosí, they were certainly frightened by a norm that could investigate the sources of their fortunes.
The second major setback was the postponement of the requirement to carry a vaccination card against Covid to carry out procedures in public and private entities.
On January 1, Arce launched this policy to stop it six days later. The government justified the freeze alluding to the long lines at vaccination posts, but this is not the truth, or not the whole truth.
What happens is that (once again) social movements allied to the MAS announced measures asking for the decree to be annulled, such as the Departmental Federation of Rural Education Teachers of La Paz, the coca producers of Yungas, the youths of MAS, the Federation of the Tupac Katari Peasants, the Bartolina Women’s Peasant Federation, the Intercultural, the Marcos and Ayllus Confederation, the Civic Committee of El Alto and the Council of Peasant Federations of Los Yungas, along with several other smaller but no less combative organizations, like the Red Ponchos.
All of them are in power today, but from the outside, they block Arce’s politics.
In a previous article, I posited that this could be due to Arce’s style of government, which, unlike his predecessor, prefers to retreat rather than confront.
However, although leadership is important, even more so in a presidential regime such as the Bolivian one, the repetition of these setbacks by Arce invite us to propose some explanations that point to more structural aspects, typical of the configuration of the Bolivian plurinational state.
The problem lies in the fact that the MAS government came to power driven by a series of popular organizations (peasant unions, indigenous movements, urban groups) that were never fully institutionalized by the State, that is, they were not absorbed by the MAS.
For the union actors, it was more beneficial to maintain the independence of their organizations without ceasing to be present in the state apparatus, which leads them to act, when it comes to preserving their interests, both inside and outside the government.
The clearest example is the Federación dos Mineiros, a cooperative whose leaders reached the leadership of the Ministry of Mining and which, when they saw that government policies did not coincide with their business interests, did not hesitate to take to the streets to confront the government.
Therefore, although Arce can set his agenda with some autonomy, in the long term, those who shape the policies, who define whether the law or public policy comes into force or not, are the social movements, or a part of them.
The aforementioned Migdal pointed out that the State engaged in true “field battles” with other actors with power who opposed or resisted its determinations, but the political scientist stated that they were, in one way or another, outside the government, not within.
The particularity of the MAS government is that its partners, when it suits them, act as allies and, when not, as independent unions.
While this is nothing new (indeed, it was the constitutive feature of the MAS government), Evo’s broad dominance and leadership over social movements somewhat mitigated this problem.
On the other hand, now, Arce absolutely lacks any access to these actors, which leads to a government with a very relative autonomy to establish its own agenda of priorities and a marked weakness to carry out its public policies.
The damage to democracy
That said, it is possible that this routine of advancing and then regressing, this logic of pleasing allies to carry out policies, is the keynote in the Arce government.
Michael Mann (the sociologist, not the filmmaker) established that states evolved as they achieved an infrastructural power in which the state penetrated and dominated society.
In Bolivia there is an inverse process: it is society that penetrates the State, it is its organizations that end up shaping the policies of the MAS.
This phenomenon is highly negative for society.
A state that cannot impose itself on the particular interests of the actors with power is a state that does not build citizenship and, in the end, neither does democracy.
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