• Bolivian President Luis Arce has denied accusations of orchestrating a coup, labeling them as lies and saying that General Juan José Zúñiga acted independently.
• Arce’s statement followed Zúñiga’s claim that the president directed the mutiny to bolster his popularity.
• Arce’s supporters rallied outside the presidential palace, offering political support.

Bolivian President Luis Arce on Thursday angrily called accusations that he was behind an attempted coup against his government “lies,” saying the general who apparently led it acted on his own and vowing that he would face justice.

Arce’s comments, his first to the press since Wednesday’s failed apparent coup, came after the general involved, Juan José Zúñiga, alleged without providing evidence that the president had ordered him to carry out the mutiny in a ruse to boost his flagging popularity.

That fueled speculation about what really happened, even after the government announced the arrest of 17 people, most of them military officers. Opposition senators and government critics joined the chorus of doubters, calling the mutiny a “self-coup.”

BOLIVIAN PRESIDENT SURVIVES FAILED COUP, CALLS FOR ‘DEMOCRACY TO BE RESPECTED,’ ARMY GENERAL ARRESTED

Some Bolivians said they believed Zúñiga’s allegations. “They are playing with the intelligence of the people, because nobody believes that it was a real coup,” said 48-year-old lawyer Evaristo Mamani.

Those claims have been strongly denied by Arce and his government. “I am not a politician who is going to win popularity through the blood of the people,” he said Thursday.

Meanwhile, Arce’s supporters rallied outside the presidential palace on Thursday, giving some political breathing room to the embattled leader as authorities made more arrests in a failed coup that shook the economically troubled country.

Among the 17 people arrested are the army chief, Gen. Zúñiga, and former navy Vice Adm. Juan Arnez Salvador, who were taken into custody the day before. All face charges of armed uprising and attacks against government infrastructure, and penalties of 15 years in prison or more, said the country’s attorney general, César Siles.

BOLIVIA GRAPPLES WITH AFTERMATH OF FAILED COUP ATTEMPT AS NATION STRIVES TO RESTORE STABILITY

The president claimed that not only military officers were involved in the plan, but people retired from the military and civil society. He did not elaborate.

The South American nation of 12 million watched in shock and bewilderment Wednesday as military forces appeared to turn on Arce, seizing control of the capital’s main square with armored vehicles, repeatedly crashing a small tank into the presidential palace and unleashing tear gas on protesters.

Senior Cabinet member Eduardo del Castillo said among the arrested was one civilian, identified as Aníbal Aguilar Gómez, who was as a key “ideologue” of the thwarted coup. He said the alleged conspirators began plotting in May.

Riot police guarded the palace doors and Arce — who has struggled to manage the country’s shortages of foreign currency and fuel — emerged on the presidential balcony as his supporters surged into the streets singing the national anthem and cheering as fireworks exploded overhead. “No one can take democracy away from us,” he roared.

Bolivians responded by chanting, “Lucho, you are not alone!”

Analysts say the eruption of public support for Arce, even if fleeting, provides him with a reprieve from the country’s economic quagmire and political turmoil. The president is locked in a deepening rivalry with popular former President Evo Morales, his erstwhile ally who has threatened to challenge Arce in 2025.

“The president’s management has been very bad, there are no dollars, there is no petrol,” said La Paz-based political analyst Paul Coca. “Yesterday’s military move is going to help his image a bit, but it’s no solution.”

Soon after Wednesday’s military maneuver was underway, it became clear that any attempted takeover had no meaningful political support. The rebellion passed bloodlessly at the end of the business day. In an extraordinary scene, Arce argued strongly with Zúñiga and his allies face-to-face in the plaza outside the palace before returning inside to name a new army commander.

“What we saw is extremely unusual for coup d’etats in Latin America, and it raises red flags,” said Diego von Vacano, an expert in Bolivian politics at Texas A&M University and former informal adviser to President Arce. “Arce looked like a victim yesterday and a hero today, defending democracy.”

Speaking in Paraguay on Thursday, U.S. deputy secretary of state for management, Rich Verma, condemned Zúñiga, saying that “democracy remains fragile in our hemisphere.”

The short-lived mutiny followed months of mounting tensions between Arce and Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president. Morales has staged a dramatic political comeback since mass protests and a deadly crackdown prompted him to resign and flee in 2019 — a military-backed ouster that his supporters decry as a coup.

Morales has vowed to run against Arce in 2025, a prospect that has rattled Arce, whose popularity has plunged as the country’s foreign currency reserves dwindle, its natural gas exports plummet and its currency peg to the U.S. dollar collapses.

Morales’ allies in Congress have made it almost impossible for Arce to govern. The cash crunch has ramped up pressure on Arce to scrap food and fuel subsidies that depleted state finances.

Defense Minister Edmundo Novillo told reporters that Zuñiga’s coup attempt had its roots in a private meeting Tuesday in which Arce sacked over the army chief’s threats on national TV to arrest Morales if he proceeded to join the 2025 race.

But Zuñiga gave officials no indication he was preparing to seize power, Novillo said.

“He admitted that he had committed some excesses,” he said of Zuñiga. “We said goodbye in the most friendly way, with hugs. Zuñiga said that he would always be at the side of the president.”

Pro-democracy advocates have already expressed doubt that any government-led investigation can be trusted.

“Judicial independence is basically zero, the credibility of the judiciary is on the floor,” said Juan Pappier, deputy director of the Americas at Human Rights Watch. “Not only do we not know today what happened, we probably will never know.”

French voters will cast their ballots on Sunday in the first of two rounds to elect 577 members of the National Assembly, as country looks set to enter a new political era.

The elections come after French President Emmanuel Macron called for a snap vote triggered by a crushing defeat to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (NR) party at the European Parliament elections on June 9.

Polls suggest the coming elections will confirm the trend. NR leads strongly with 36 percent of the vote, followed by left-wing bloc Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) at 28.5 percent, trailed by Macron’s centrist alliance – Ensemble – with 21 percent.

If the results echo the polls, Macron might have to cohabitate with an antagonistic prime minister, regardless of who is elected.

How do the French elections work?

Voting opens at 06:00 GMT and is expected to end at 16:00 GMT in most of the country, but polling stations in Paris and other major cities will stay open until 18:00 GMT.

To win a majority in the National Assembly, a party or alliance needs 289 seats — just over the halfway mark in the House. Macron’s outgoing coalition fell short of that number, limiting its ability to push through its legislative agenda.

For the verdict on any of the 577 seats to be called on Sunday, July 30, two conditions need to be met. First, the voter turnout needs to be at least 25 percent. Second, a candidate needs to win an absolute majority of votes cast.

In a multiparty system like France’s, that typically means that many, if not most, contests go to a second round of voting – scheduled this time for July 7.

Only those candidates who secure at least 12.5 percent of the vote in the first round can stand in the second round, effectively narrowing the field of contestants.

Why is this election so different?

Traditionally, National Assembly elections are held straight after the presidential vote, and so reflect the same popular mood. The result is a prime minister from the same political party as the president, who then can implement policies with a strong mandate.

But those power dynamics have now shifted and for the first time in 22 years, France will have a state of cohabitation: a deeply unpopular president ruling alongside a government elected in as a vote of dissatisfaction against Macron himself.

“It will mark the beginning of a new way of governing and the end of the presidential agenda,” said Emmanuel Dupuy, president of the Institute for European Perspective and Security Studies, a think tank on diplomacy and political analysis. “Macronism has already almost collapsed and it will exit the election totally wiped out,” he said.

How did we get here?

Macron first came to power in 2017 riding a wave of support, as he pledged to create a centrist bloc, lacing the moderate left and right together. But it didn’t take long before his language started sounding too aloof to the ears of people in the suburbs – he got the nickname Jupiter. His economic reforms were too right wing to liberals who had previously backed him; and his way of governing was seen as too despotic by many right and left voters.

Now, the election could mark an end to Jupiter’s solo show, as France looks set to enter a new political era.

“He runs the country like a CEO of a company,” said Samantha de Bendern, associate fellow at Chatham House. “But a country is not a company and he failed to build alliances with partners – Macron is a loner,” de Bendern said.

One of the starkest signals of his isolation was the Yellow Vest movement – a period of violent protests in 2018. What started as workers on lower-middle incomes infuriated by planned increases in diesel taxes snowballed into a wider movement against the president’s perceived bias in favour of the elite. His second mandate was marked by a highly contested bill in 2023 to raise the country’s retirement by two years which turned into another huge domestic challenge as he faced widespread opposition.

And while he won a second mandate in 2022 – in good measure by scaring, rather than attracting, voters over the prospect of the far right taking over the presidency – the tactic seems to have tired many. “There is a feeling of anger – people are fed up with showing this scare for Le Pen while being forced to vote for Macron to keep out the far right,” de Bendern said.

What is Le Pen’s ‘dediabolisation’?

Meanwhile, Le Pen has meticulously crafted a so-called dediabolisation – de-demonisation – strategy over the past two decades, aimed at broadening the party’s base while tempering its radical discourse to distance itself from many references that had made the NR too toxic to several voters.

The party has long been associated with notorious racists, and xenophobic and anti-Semitic slurs. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, once convicted of hate speech for saying that Nazi gas chambers were “a detail of history”, was expelled from the party in 2015. Le Pen convinced the moderate right instead that she was not a threat to democracy and conquered areas traditionally close to the far left, especially in the Communist Party, promising social welfare policies and tight restrictions on migrants.

“Many [by voting NR] are expressing their opposition to a system that they feel is depriving them of what they deserve in favour of people, mostly foreigners, who are getting benefits that are not due,” said Baptiste Roger-Lacan, historian and political analyst with a focus on far-right parties in Europe.

Today, the party’s candidate to be the country’s prime minister is Jordan Bardella, an impeccably dressed 28-year-old man who looks like a mix between a Wolf of Wall Street and Superman’s alter ego Clark Kent. Yet he comes from the suburbs and speaks to his tens of thousands of followers not just on the street but also on TikTok. He has no experience in governance.

On the other side, far to centre-left parties have united under the New Popular Front. Its most vocal cause has been its support for the Palestinian cause amid the war in Gaza, a position that has earned the grouping popularity among young voters and the Muslim community.

By contrast, the NR has firmly supported Israel condemning “pogroms on Israeli soil” and attacking the leader of the far-left La France Insoumise party, Jean-Luc Melenchon, for failing to call the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel “terrorism” – something that has caused friction within the bloc itself.

What would a far-right win mean?

The most serious repercussion of a win for the NR is going to be on the domestic front. While the party now says anti-Semitism is a problem of the left-wing party, it has shifted its focus against migrants and Muslims. France is home to Europe’s biggest Muslim community, with families settled there for several generations.

While Bardella did not specify what “specific legislation” he would push for to fight “Islamist ideologies”, he said in the past the party would work to ban the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in public spaces and to make it easier to close mosques.

The RN has also made its top priority the adoption of stringent border controls, the scrapping of birthright citizenship – a practice that for centuries has been granting citizenship to those born in France to foreign parents – and the introduction via constitutional referendum of the “national preference”, a system by which someone would be excluded benefits from social security rights unless with a French passport.

“Clearly the NR is still xenophobic so any foreigner has something to lose, any foreigner who has not a European heritage would have to lose something if the NR were to be elected,” Roger-Lacan said.

And what about foreign policy?

With his eyes on power, Bardella has been softening or reversing some of the party’s traditional positions. He made a U-turn on Ukraine saying he was committed to keep providing military support to Kyiv, while pushing back against critics’ allegations of some party members’ links to the Kremlin.

Still, considering Macron’s unwavering stance on Ukraine and France’s role as a pillar of the European Union, a Bardella-led government not committed as much to the European project, would mark a shift.

During a news conference on Monday, Bardella said he opposes sending French troops and weaponry capable of striking targets on Russian soil.

“He is in a phase where is trying to reassure the non-NR electorate, and possibly future EU partners, but clearly the party gaining power would add a lot of tension between France and the rest of the EU,” said Roger-Lacan, who is also former deputy editor-in-chief at the think tank Le Grand Continent.

Unlike Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who had transitioned towards more Atlantic, pro-NATO, pro-EU positions years before her election victory in 2022, Roger-Lacan explains, the NR’s conversion “sounds extremely contextual”.

Still, should the far right win the elections, observers note, it could end up abstaining from creating too much tremor, should it win the elections, as the group is playing the long game. It’s ultimate goal: capturing the presidency in 2027.