In August 2025, two right-wing candidates polled top of Bolivia’s national elections. They will head to a runoff on October 19. Whichever wins, the result marks a crushing defeat of the incumbent Movement towards Socialism (MAS) after two decades in power.
The country’s major left party has been left with just one seat in the national legislature, ending its control of Congress and the presidency. On election night, crowds in the country’s political capital, La Paz chanted: ‘El MAS nunca más’ (‘MAS, never again!).
In Bolivia, the twenty-first century has been defined by MAS and Evo Morales, a former coca growers’ union leader and first Indigenous president of a country with an estimated two-thirds Indigenous population.
After ascending to power in 2006, Morales and his party made important advances on everything from everyday racism to social programs – in sharp contrast to previous neoliberal administrations. But in recent years MAS – and Morales’s legacy – have been tarnished by infighting and an economic crisis, which ultimately culminated in dramatic election losses.
Spoiled ballots – or protest vote?
Former President Morales was prevented from running for what would have been an unconstitutional fourth term by the national courts. In response, he urged his supporters to spoil their ballots.
With voting mandatory in Bolivia, null and blank ballots have long been used as a form of resistance against traditional party politics. In August, approximately 19 per cent of all ballots were marked null – nearly six times above average.
Not all of the spoiled ballots translate into support for Morales. Nonetheless, the longest-serving president in Bolivia’s history triumphantly told the coca growers’ radio station: ‘we’re in first place’.
The spoiled ballots nixed any possibility for Morales’s erstwhile political heir, 36-year-old MAS Senate President Andrónico Rodríguez, who ran on an independent left ticket but won only 8.4 per cent of the vote. The official MAS candidate, chosen after incumbent President Luis Arce decided not to run for reelection, was former Interior Minister Eduardo del Castillo. He garnered just barely enough votes to maintain the party’s legal standing.
This splintering of MAS reflected mud-slinging and divisions that have spread within the party over the past five years. They began when Morales’s former Finance Minister Arce won the Presidency decisively, a year after Morales was removed from office after trying to run unconstitutionally for a fourth term. Morales immediately plotted his return, seeing Arce as a temporary proxy – and almost immediately creating a power struggle when Arce’s administration asserted its autonomy. As Óscar Paco, a former Morales supporter, argued: ‘Evo already had his moment, he should make space for young people’.
Economic failings and centralised power
Another major element in the MAS defeat stems from Bolivia’s economic woes. After 2013, once global commodity prices fell and natural gas reserves declined, state revenues moved onto shaky ground. The potential cutting of fuel subsidies – which largely benefit agribusiness and illegal mining activities but have driven people worried about rising transport costs into the streets – exacerbated tensions.
Meanwhile, Bolivia’s currency has steadily weakened, with the black-market US dollar exchange rate now about double the official one. As the economy tanked – with bread size decreasing even as prices rose – memories of the MAS party’s accomplishments faded from view.
In office, the party originally built by Bolivia’s formidable social movements achieved astounding improvements for Indigenous and poor people. Poverty was reduced by half and natural gas deals were audaciously re-negotiated with powerful multinationals, with the increased funds used to extend rural infrastructure. Almost every corner of Bolivia had a new school, road, or health clinic.
The acceleration of extractivism means that Bolivia now ranks second only to Brazil – a country eight times its size – in tropical primary forest loss
Government programs that enabled the middle class to grow by about ten per cent rested on continuing an economic model in place since the Spanish invaded, based on extracting raw materials. Repeated cycles of boom and bust led MAS it to deplete the country’s reserves in an effort to prop up political support. The acceleration of extractivism means that Bolivia now ranks second only to Brazil – a country eight times its size – in tropical primary forest loss due largely to growing soy farms and cattle ranching in the east.
In the process, power centered increasingly around the charismatic Morales, rather than in the country’s grassroots movements. ‘MAS increasingly ignored the movements and ideals that put it in power and only cared about re-election,’ explains political analyst José de la Fuente, who worked for a MAS-controlled regional government.
Corruption scandals meanwhile and repeatedly shook the MAS party. One of the most egregious under Morales diverted funds destined for Indigenous development projects; another involving exceptions to agroindustry laws for the President’s son directly tainted Arce’s administration.
Fears of a racist backlash
Over the past two decades, the MAS government also made strides against the country’s deep-seated and divisive racism. ‘We don’t want to go back to the racism of the past’ has been a popular refrain among those frightened by the return of the right.
While yet to formally gain power, court rulings have already begun to favour key rightwing figures who led the 2019 coup against MAS, and subsequent massacres. A judge has annulled charges against former interim president Jeanine Áñez and required her case be retried. Former Santa Cruz Governor Fernando Camacho was moved to house arrest and Marco Antonio Pumari, another central figure in the 2019 coup, has been released from preventive detention.
‘These politicized court decisions will inevitably pave the way for more political violence like the massacres Áñez oversaw’, says human rights attorney Thomas Becker, who consults with the families of 2019 massacre victims.
Indigenous voters worry that a return to right-wing rule will trigger a racist backlash not seen since 2019. Far-right candidate Jorge ‘Tuto’ Quiroga ‘is very racist’, says Máxima Laura, a street vendor in traditional Aymara dress and former MAS voter. ‘If he wins he won’t so much as look at us Indigenous women.’
Yet amid the crisis and destruction of MAS, one of its successes is striking. In a nation with one of the world’s highest number of coup d’etats, President Luis Arce appears fully committed to a democratic transition, even though it comes at the cost of disassembling his own political party and many of its accomplishments.
Despite MAS’s complete rout, there is little doubt that Bolivia’s social movements – long resilient against colonial powers, military dictatorships, and neoliberal governments – will rise again, to press for a more just and equitable society. It may take time, but if history serves as a guide, it is all but inevitable.
A longer version of this article first appeared in the North American Congress on Latin America in English and Spanish
