Bolivia: Unprincipled Left Split Causes Electoral Debacle

At the general election on August 17 2025, Bolivia’s right wing scored a greater electoral and political victory than expected, bringing 20 years of MAS-IPSP government to an end.

Christian Democrat (PDC) candidate Rodrigo Paz Pereira surprisingly won the first round with a robust 31.32 per cent, followed closely by hard-right candidate “Tuto” Quiroga with 27.35 per cent. Another right-wing candidate, Samuel Doria (Unity), came third with 20.63 per cent, with yet another right-wing candidate, Manfred Reyes Villa (APB, Autonomy for Bolivia), in fifth place with 6.31 per cent. That is, overall, right-wing, anti-MAS candidates obtained over 85 per cent of the votes cast. There will be a second round between Paz and Quiroga on October 19 2025, with Doria already expressing support for Rodrigo Paz.

The left-wing candidate with the most votes was Andronico Rodriguez (AP, Alianza Popular), who split from Evo Morales’s own splinter group; he got a paltry 7.76 per cent. He was followed by Eduardo del Castillo, the Arce government’s candidate, who obtained a humiliating 3.18 per cent. Morales, who was barred from being a candidate, called for people to spoil their ballots, which accounted for 19 per cent.

At the parliamentary level the left got no seats in the Senate (out of 36) and six in the Chamber of Deputies (out of 130), that is, compared to 2020 the MAS-IPSP lost 21 and 69 seats in the Senate and Chamber, respectively. In 2025 the right-wing parties combined obtained 36 seats in the Senate and 123 in the Chamber of Deputies.

To understand the MAS-IPSP crisis leading to the split, the history behind the November 2019 coup d’etat is essential. Morales was elected president in 2005 (under the 1967 constitution), re-elected in 2009 and 2014 and, controversially, stood as a presidential candidate again in 2019. The controversy arose because Article 168 of the new Bolivian constitution stipulates that the president “may be re-elected once for a continuous term.”

In February 2016, Morales organised a national referendum to reform Article 168 so that he could “be re-elected twice continuously.” The opposition went ballistic, as they had hoped to confront a less formidable MAS candidate than Morales. They waged a nasty, mendacious media campaign that focused on Morales having fathered a child out of wedlock (the child did not exist) but which did the trick: Morales lost the referendum (51.30 per cent to 48.70 per cent).

Morales and MAS lawmakers resorted to the Constitutional Court, arguing that limits on re-election violated constitutional political rights. This led the court to nullify the 2016 referendum, thus making the plebiscite irrelevant and allowing Morales to run again in 2019. These manoeuvrings not only discredited him — one of the most formidable revolutionary political leaders of Bolivia and Latin America — but also emboldened a disgruntled opposition. They announced protests and launched a national campaign of motorway roadblocks aimed at disrupting internal commerce.

Faced with the oligarchy’s lethal threat of subversive violence, Morales sought to legitimise his candidacy and restore calm by inviting the Organisation of American States (OAS) not only to observe the election but to audit it, making its report legally binding. On a visit to Bolivia, the infamous OAS secretary-general, Luis Almagro, affirmed Morales’s right to run again, causing an uproar among government opponents. However, Almagro then presented an audit before the final vote count, falsely alleging irregularities that triggered charges of election fraud, which ended in the violent overthrow of Morales.

After a year of heroic struggles involving repression, imprisonment, torture, massacres and exile, against the de facto government of Jeanine Anez, the MAS nominated Luis Arce as its presidential candidate. Arce won the election with a handsome 55 per cent (in 2019, Morales got 47 per cent). By 2022, President Arce had managed to recover the country’s economy, which had been left in a parlous state by the incompetence and corruption of the Anez dictatorship and the dreadful effects of the pandemic. By 2023, Bolivia had one of the region’s highest rates of economic growth, reaching a historic high GDP of $45 billion.

In October 2023 Morales is proclaimed the “only presidential candidate” for the 2025 election and leader of the party by a highly dubious MAS national congress. The congress was marred by expulsions and the non-participation of Arce and Bolivia’s vice-president, David Choquehuanca. Many individuals and mass organisations affiliated with the MAS questioned the congress and the validity of its decisions, declaring it to be illegal. Morales responded by saying he was to lead the recuperation “of the revolution and save the nation again.”

The Supreme Electoral Tribunal did not recognise the congress, ruled that the MAS should hold another congress to elect its national committee, and disqualified Morales from being a candidate. From there on, everything went downhill.

Morales’s candidacy two years in advance led to incredibly intense polarisation within the party, which reached levels of insanity. For two years, both factions (Arce and Morales) traded insults and accusations that ranged from treacherously selling out to imperialism to narcotrafficking, in an ever-degenerating crescendo of manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre. It reached its peak with the Morales faction staging national mobilisations in 2024, blocking motorways and aiming to cause the country’s economic collapse. The Arce faction unleashed repression and countless legal and political schemes against Evo.

By 2024 Bolivia’s economy was in trouble, had suffered a drastic fall in exports from $2.175 billion in 2022 to $1.256bn in 2024. This particularly affected energy export revenues, turning Bolivia from a net exporter into a net importer of petrol and diesel. This additionally involved maintaining state subsidies for oil and diesel, which by 2025 cost US$2 bn.

To maintain an enlarged state apparatus (involving substantial public expenditure on health, education, infrastructure, pensions, and plenty of other social benefits) — which produced a yawning gap between earnings and spending — the Arce government used international reserves. These declined from about $11bn in 2017 to a catastrophic $1.98bn by 2024, with the central bank financing 80 per cent of the deficit.

By the end of 2024, public debt was 95 per cent of GDP. The economy had an acute shortage of dollars, of diesel, petrol, and other items of daily consumption, leading to a spike in inflation. Due to speculation, black-market and contraband, food inflation was about 25 per cent.

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Even worse, Morales’s supporters, being dominant in the Senate, torpedoed all government projects to get credits to alleviate the harsh economic situation. Arce had no option but to apply austerity while seeking macroeconomic stability in an economy in meltdown, which led to mass discontent. The right-wing opposition put all the blame on Arce’s government and sought to capitalise on the growing social discontent, as did the Morales faction.

Rodrigo Paz has promised to liberalise Bolivia’s system to overcome the MAS government’s “statist” model. Quiroga, a hard-right politician who played a central role in the 2019 coup against Morales, proposes an IMF-supported stabilisation programme and constitutional reform.

What the split in the MAS has brought about is granting Bolivia’s powerful oligarchy an auspicious context to dismantle the plurinational state, allowing it to attempt to roll back 20 years of social gains introduced under MAS rule: it has the presidency, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, an immensely weakened and fragmented MAS, and is the least worried about Morales’s spoiled ballots.

The most depressing feature is the self-inflicted nature of the left defeat as there were no substantive political or programmatic basis for the MAS split that caused it. The two factions shared a set of beliefs stemming from principles enshrined in the constitution. Both profess a strong affirmation of national sovereignty and the right to self-determination; the public ownership of the country’s key natural resources (gas, oil, minerals); the central economic role of the state to bring about social justice and a fair redistribution of national income aimed at reducing inequalities; and the recognition of the identity, cultural, linguistic, political, and social rights of 36 indigenous nations; and much more.

All principles which both factions genuinely uphold and defend — principles far more important than any personal ambitions. These are the bases for unity and, above all, for organising the struggle to defend Bolivia’s plurinational state constitution.

To top it all off, the unprincipled split infected all the mass organisations that had made the plurinational state possible. The MAS-IPSP is a construct halfway between a federation of social movements and a political party, in which the rich social universe of indigenous, peasant, women’s, miners’, workers’ organisations, and so forth, belong to the party in a corporatist fashion.

The split spread like wildfire from the top down through all the MAS social organisations, fracturing their unity. Bringing about unity in Bolivia’s left will therefore be very complex because there is no authoritative body that can adjudicate on conflicts or differences.

Nevertheless, unity is the sine qua non precondition to confront what the coming right-wing government has in store. The people of Bolivia have a long history of resistance and struggle; it will not be easy for the oligarchy to roll back the plurinational state. We, in the international field, must prompt ourselves to organise solidarity with the coming heroic struggles of the people of Bolivia.