Analysis
The scandalous downfall of Evo Morales also damaged the Bolivian left
MAS, exhausted by an endless intramural power struggle, has in effect committed political suicide – a collapse only partly offset by the fact that, fortunately enough, the right is no less divided.
Three-time president Evo Morales will not appear on the ballot in Bolivia’s next presidential election on August 17. This time he must give up, possibly permanently, the quest for power that he has pursued all his life, and which has become an all-out obsession. Back in 2016 – still at the height of his popularity – he went as far as trying, by referendum, to get around the Constitution’s ban on “indefinite re-election.”
Defeated at the polls, he nonetheless got a green light to run again from a Constitutional Court loyal to his government, setting the stage for a fourth mandate that ended when the 2019 coup forced him to flee to Mexico. Once in exile, his only objective was clawing his way back, whatever the cost. Deaf to swelling anger among the base of his own Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) – which had not looked kindly on his flight in 2019 – he hand-picked the dutiful, otherwise unremarkable former finance minister Luis Arce as presidential stand-in, confident he would do nothing more than keep the seat warm for him. When Arce insisted on governing – poorly, but on his own terms – Morales declared war, and Arce replied in kind.
That war ended in the worst possible way for Morales: he was pushed out as MAS party chair; hit with an arrest warrant on abuse and human-trafficking charges tied to an alleged relationship with a 15-year-old girl, with whom he was accused of fathering a child in 2016 (a case for which there is serious evidence, but behind which one cannot help but see political motivations); driven into self-isolation in his rural stronghold of Lauca Eñe outside Cochabamba to avoid arrest; dealt a devastating blow by a Plurinational Constitutional Court decision – rejected by his supporters – that capped the presidency at two terms; and, finally, barred from the 2025 candidate list by the Supreme Electoral Court, which had already voided the legal status of the political vehicle he intended to use to support his candidacy, PAN-BOL.
Morales certainly did not go quietly. Starting on June 2, his loyalists put up more than 20 roadblocks across Cochabamba, La Paz, Potosí, Oruro and Santa Cruz, paralyzing the country to try to force approval of a fifth presidential run. The tactic only earned him terrorism accusations and further squeezed an economy already reeling from chronic fuel shortages, soaring food prices and thinning hard-currency reserves – all tied to the extractivist model wholeheartedly embraced by successive governments, including those led by MAS.
He is not the only loser. The entire left has been hurt by this affair, which will be going to the polls split into four camps: the Evista bloc, now left without a candidate; the core MAS bloc – no longer behind Arce, who withdrew amid rock-bottom approval ratings – fronted by former Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo together with campesino leader Milán Berna; Eva Copa’s Morena party, led by the ex-Senate president who was the de facto leader of MAS after the coup and later became mayor of El Alto; and Alianza Popular, headed by Senate president Andrónico Rodríguez, once Morales’s protégé and today the left’s strongest hopeful after having distanced himself both from Morales and Arce.
MAS, exhausted by an endless intramural power struggle, has in effect committed political suicide – a collapse only partly offset by the fact that, fortunately enough, the right is no less divided. The usual suspects will all be running separately: businessman Samuel Doria Medina of Unidad, former president Jorge Quiroga of Libre, and Cochabamba mayor Manfred Reyes Villa of Autonomía Para Bolivia – the only Bolivian politicians whose longevity rivals Morales’s own.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/non-ammesso-alle-presidenziali-il-rumoroso-tramonto-di-evo-morales on 2025-06-11