For some, these will be the first elections of a “new historical cycle,” as defined by Samuel Doria Medina, the entrepreneur and candidate of the Unity Bloc, which also includes former president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga and Luis Fernando Camacho [governor of Santa Cruz since 2021, former leader of the pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee].

It is evident that this trajectory coincides with the “(extreme) right turn” that the continent is beginning to experience, with Donald Trump humiliating Latinos in the north and Javier Milei vociferating homophobic slogans in the south. These two figures, especially the latter, serve as models for some Bolivian candidates. But the internal and deeper causes of the novelty that these elections will represent compared to the political climate of the previous two decades are different. First and foremost, the split of MAS [in autumn 2024] into two parts and – by one of those coincidences that aren’t really coincidences – the parallel failure of the party’s statist strategy to manage the country’s natural resources.

Let’s start with the latter point. This failure became apparent in February 2023, when Bolivians discovered that the central bank’s foreign exchange reserves had vanished. It was then revealed that the main promise with which the government had justified the nationalisation of gas in 2006 and the “productive communitarian social economic model” it had built from that date, namely that the revenues from the subsoil would remain in the country, had not been kept. The incredible surplus of foreign currency from the period of prosperity (2006-2014), which reached 630,000 million bolivars (90,000 million dollars, ten times Bolivia’s GDP in the previous era), was dissipated due to the growth of imports, capital flight, increased public spending, and the lack of cutting-edge progressive measures – or “second generation” measures – that would have allowed the plugging of the holes in the economy through which income was escaping. A significant volume of infrastructure remained, although not entirely functional, but the lifestyle the country was maintaining suddenly became unsustainable.

The economy needed to be “adjusted,” which President Luis Arce refused to do and it is already clear that he will not do before the end of his term in October this year. This decision, however, has not been of great use to him, as 88% of the population describes the economic situation as “bad,” “very bad,” or “average” (the worst regional result)[1], in a context where the socio-economic crisis is the major concern of Bolivians. At the same time, 87% of them want to “go in a very different direction from that under the leadership of the Arce government.”

This has been reflected in voting intentions. In the most serious series of polls published so far, Luis Arce garners only 2% of the vote, ten times less than Evo Morales, who benefits from his rural “hard vote,” but who, with about 20%, is also very far from his past results, having lost the support of the emerging urban middle class that previously supported him. In short, it’s a disaster for both. It must be added to this picture that for MAS, it is already practically impossible to win a second round of elections, which has been provided for in the Constitution since 2009 but has never taken place until now. Therefore, even if the fragmentation of what is outside and in opposition to MAS led to one of the wings of the latter placing itself between the two most voted candidates in the first round, the forecasts would lean in favour of the rival candidate, even if he were the least well-placed of them. Faced with the weakness of MAS, an opponent like “Tuto” Quiroga [president of the Republic from 7 August 2001 to 6 August 2002, and vice-president under the presidency of Hugo Banzer, from August 1997 to August 2001], Samuel Doria Medina [vice-president of the Socialist International since April 2023] or even the mayor of Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes Villa, are passionate about embodying “anti-masism,” while the billionaire Marcelo Claure seeks to play, on a local scale, a role similar to that of Elon Musk in the American election.

This is the conclusion predicted in August 2023 by the former vice-president and main theorist of the “process of change,” Álvaro García Linera, the only important leader to have kept out of the fratricidal struggle taking place in the indigenous and popular camp: “Divided, MAS can lose in the first round,” he declared at the time[2]. To which Andrónico Rodríguez, the young president of the Senate and, for some, the natural heir to Morales, later replied: “in a year, we will be frustrated, disappointed, exiled and suddenly imprisoned”[3]. Andrónico, as everyone calls him, has sought, so far unsuccessfully, to be the presidential candidate of the entire MAS, and not just of the “evista” faction.

If we consider that MAS has been the most powerful party in the history of Bolivia and the only one to have succeeded in uniting almost the entire Bolivian left, bringing together Trotskyists and post-Marxists behind a national-popular project that presented the indigenous people as the subject of the democratic revolution, the question that arises is: what has led it to this situation?

The “Caudillista” System

To understand this, we must take into account that the Bolivian political system is highly personalised or “caudillista.” This is a very old legacy, first pre-Columbian and then colonial, which has consolidated over time due to the weakness of democratic institutions and “employment dependency” or dependency on public positions to obtain socio-economic advancement in a country where there are few modern private enterprises and where 80% of the economy is informal.

This does not mean that sociological and ideological factors do not intervene in Bolivian politics, but simply that they express themselves through figureheads. The truly effective political groups are composed of networks of adherents to a leader. Parties are composed of these networks and, when they are large, of coalitions of these networks that tend to divide in the long term because the loyalty of members is not directly to the institution, but to their respective leaders. Put axiomatically: each leader generates a network of personal supporters around them. But the reverse is also true: each network can have only one leader (otherwise it would be an institutional network, not a personalised one). So, if the leader falls, the entire network loses its power. This is a form of populist organisation, in the sense of Ernesto Laclau: the name of the leader is the symbol that represents and articulates the different demands of political actors, which are demands for power, and, secondarily, also demands from sectors of the electorate[4].

Several attitudes follow from this: 1° the difficulty for the caudillo to renounce his status, as this decision would have repercussions for his entire political current; 2° the tendency to eliminate the rival through “all or nothing” games or the absence of institutionalised win-win agreements; 3° the propensity of some, as well as the resistance of others, to presidential re-election and 4° the difficulty of any succession (for example, the history of Bolivia does not include any case of successful succession)[5].

Between 2006 and 2019, Evo Morales embodied the indigenous and popular movement, the extractive and redistributive economic model, the “big state.” He embodied the left, nationalism, and even the nation. That is to say, it was he who gave a personal character to the hegemony of the revolutionary project[6]. There were even symptoms of a personality cult, such as the practice of baptising buildings and institutions with the president’s name or even that of his parents, the construction of a museum to honour him in his native village, Orinoca, or the granting (sometimes self-granting) to Morales of a large number and variety of honorary titles. The most recent was that of “commander” of MAS, a “title” that, paradoxically, did not belong to him when he was a powerful president.

After his overthrow on 10 November 2019, all this personal power, which was enormous and seemed indisputable, dissipated like the morning mist, and nothing has been the same since. MAS managed to partially transcend Morales, as it returned to power in October 2020, after a crushing electoral victory, with 55% of the vote, without the ex-president at its head. But who really returned to power at that moment was not the MAS organisation or apparatus, but a new caudillo called Luis Arce and his entourage, which, it is no coincidence, had emerged from antagonism with Evo’s entourage.

It was expected that from that moment on, Arce would become the holder of hegemony and put his own personal stamp on the new conjuncture, less favourable but still promising for the left. MAS was not equipped with any mechanism, regulation, or institutional habit that would have allowed things to happen differently. To that extent, there was no longer room for Morales. The only way to avoid the split, which began to take shape during the electoral campaign, would have been for Morales to withdraw from active political life. But in that case, his entourage, the caudillista network that depended on him, would have disappeared, which would have meant the end of his comrades’ careers. It was therefore a very unlikely outcome, and it always has been. Despite appearances, caudillismo is a collective phenomenon. Moreover, psychological factors must be taken into account. Reading the best biographies of Morales reveals that his personality is one of those that thrives in caudillista systems, with tendencies towards narcissism and megalomania[7]. Morales never wanted to resign, even though he mentioned this possibility on a few occasions[8]. His life had only one meaning: his re-election, that is, the renewal of power. He is the most perfect caudillo Bolivia has had since Víctor Paz Estenssoro (leader of the National Revolution of 1952, then president from 1952 to 1956 and three times thereafter) or perhaps ever.

Once two caudillos appeared on the public stage, waving the same ideological flags – Evo and Lucho –, claiming the same political and electoral space and weighing equally on the coming elections, the only possibility that remained was the one that eventually occurred: collision. One of the two had to live; the other, die. Figuratively speaking, yes, but also, why not, literally.

Evo Morales with His Back to the Wall

On 27 October 2024, a police commando attempted to arrest former president Morales as he was travelling, very early in the morning, from his home in the village of Villa Tunari to the town of Lauca Ñ, where the radio station Kausachum Coca is located, which broadcasts the former president’s Sunday programme. The two localities are neighbouring and are in the Chapare, a subtropical area of coconut growers and Morales’ historical stronghold.

At that time, coca growers were blocking roads to demand Morales’ electoral eligibility, after the ban on participation decided in December 2023 by a chamber of the Constitutional Court associated with the government. Shortly before their roadblocks, the “evistas” had marched from the southern Bolivian plateau to La Paz, with the half-admitted aim of creating the conditions to overthrow President Arce or, at least, to back him into a corner so that he would accept the electoral eligibility of their leader.

If an attempt was made to arrest him, it was because, in the context of the march in question, Morales had been accused by the prosecutor’s office of “aggravated rape with incitement to prostitution.” According to the complaint, he had had a daughter with a 15-year-old teenager in the border town of Tupiza in 2016, when he was president and 57 years old. The police raid that morning was not very effective, and Morales’ cars managed to escape the vehicles that wanted to block their way. During their escape, they were shot at. An assistant to the former president filmed him during the escape, crouched in the passenger seat, alongside a driver who continued to drive despite his injuries. Subsequently, government authorities indicated that Morales and his entourage had passed through a police roadblock and had fired at the police. The escapees first claimed it was a failed arrest, but then changed their story and began to denounce an alleged “assassination attempt.”

The truth probably lies somewhere in between. The police tried to arrest Morales by force, as they had done two years earlier, with more skill, with another politician defended by his people, the governor of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, accused of having led the demonstrations that led to Morales’ fall in 2019. Camacho is still in prison. In Morales’ case, the tactic did not work. One of the bullets could very well have ended his life, in which case the fratricidal struggle would have ended with a Macbethian denouement, and the spectre of the assassinated indigenous leader would probably still be demanding vengeance today.

Morales did not physically disappear, but the government is seeking to make him disappear symbolically. A few days after what we have just recounted, he was forced to suspend more than a month of roadblocks without having achieved any result. And the accusation of rape has done him a lot of political harm. This is primarily why it was launched, and not because anyone was interested in the alleged victim, who, on the contrary, is now in a worse situation than before: in hiding and persecuted by the Public Ministry and the government, who want to extract from her confessions compromising the former president.

Meanwhile, Morales is effectively confined to his Chapare fortress – where he is protected from a hypothetical police commando operation by a personal guard of coca growers and left-wing militants – because he would be arrested anywhere else. He has tried to take it with humour. He declared that he had been done a favour by being confined, because now he no longer has to visit people, but they come to see him, which has allowed him to gain in productivity.

On the other hand, Morales has found himself without a party. President Arce’s faction gained control of MAS in November last year, thanks to a decision by the same chamber of the Constitutional Court that also invalidated the coca leader’s candidacy, and without taking into account the opinion of the electoral authorities. After losing the party he founded in its current version in July 1997 and which allowed him to access power and stay there longer than any other Bolivian politician, Morales had to conclude an agreement with another organisation, the Front for Victory (FPV), which agreed to present him as its “guest” presidential candidate, while evangelicals massively disaffiliated from MAS. His candidacy is an act of will before being a fact, because, as we have seen, the Constitutional Court has set two terms as an intangible limit for all elected authorities in the country (although the Constitution allows non-consecutive presidential re-election without term limits). This makes it impossible for Morales to register and participate in the upcoming elections, as the president of the Electoral Tribunal has already anticipated[9].

“We will be on the ballot!” Morales insisted on the X network. With this hypothesis, that of being on the ballot no matter what, he has reached an agreement with the FPV, the precise characteristics of which are unknown. This party belongs to a family of politicians and has in the past been handed over to candidates of the most diverse ideologies, taking advantage of the fact that it has electoral legal personality, which is difficult to obtain in Bolivia. It has been criticised as being a “family business,” which its president, Eliseo Rodríguez, has denied. The party, which will now dress Evo Morales in its colours, has some legal affairs pending with the Electoral Tribunal. It is possible that the current power is seeking to obtain an electoral veto for the FPV, which would force the former president to look for another organisation willing to accept him.

Morales’ refusal to be replaced by someone else contributes to the officials’ strategy to improve voting intentions in favour of Arce by ensuring that the president is the “only left-wing option” in the elections.

A Lose-Lose Game

Evo Morales is fighting hard not to sink, but will is no longer enough for him, because he is no longer facing, as in the 1990s, the leaders of neoliberalism who always ended up falling into his traps or victimising him. Today, he must face his former companions, who also have popular roots and instincts, who know him very well and therefore know what to attack him on. And above all, he must face almost alone the entire machinery of power with its three heads: state politics, justice, the media. He is suffering the combined attack of Arce’s government and the traditional Bolivian elite, which hates him as much as the former. It seems difficult for him to politically survive such an attack.

Arce seems to have retained better cards, but he will not necessarily be able to play them. Under the current conditions, after the embarrassing and dangerous misstep he has already made, it is very difficult for him to imprison Morales. The latter has completely rejected the possibility of going into exile again, as he did in 2019 in Mexico and Argentina. Thus, Arce’s announced victory on the chessboard has transformed, over time, into a stalemate, which, as we know, is equivalent to a drawn game.

How will he present himself for re-election if his electoral support is so weak and economic problems are worsening over time?

The economic crisis continues to damage his image. Queues to buy petrol and diesel returned after carnival, worsening the discomfort of citizens. Inflation in the first two months of this year was 3.4%, the same rate that was generally observed throughout an entire year before the boom of the economic model. No one knows if he will be able to continue to provide the economy with the inputs it needs, or if he will be able to pay this year’s debt maturities. These days it is said that “the same blindness that drives Evo to believe he will be able to run in the elections, drives Arce to believe he can win them.” The last thing to be lost is hope.

Each of the two leaders has predicted that the other’s career will end badly. Who knows. One thing is certain, however: both, beyond their past achievements, will be responsible – if things continue like this – for a crushing defeat of the Bolivian left, in the present and immediate future, a left that has been hegemonic in the country for two decades.

Fernando Molina is the author of various works on Bolivia, including Historia contemporánea de Bolivia (Gente de Blanco, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 2016) and El racismo en Bolivia (Libros Nóadas, La Paz, 2022).

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