The Internal Rift Threatening Bolivia’s Left

Every Sunday, Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, goes on air for his radio program, Evo Is the People, Leader of the Humble. It’s become required listening for Bolivian political analysts. Among other things, Morales uses the slot to go after his political foes. That means Bolivia’s right-wing opposition, NATO, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But these days, his targets also include the government of his own political party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), and its leader, President Luis Arce.

The power struggle over who will lead the MAS in Bolivia’s 2025 elections has burst into the open. It is already complicating governance, with squabbling in the media and rebellions in parliament. And it is hurting both Arce and Morales’s image among the public. If it reaches the point where they run for separate parties, then they could split the MAS vote; even if it doesn’t, the winner may be too tarnished to secure a majority for the MAS. Either scenario would transform the country’s political scene: After almost two decades in which the MAS has governed alone, Bolivia may return to a more complex picture of coalition government. The conservative opposition, long unable to challenge the MAS at the ballot box, might recover a degree of political power.

When Morales led the MAS to power in 2006, it was the first party to win a majority in Bolivian politics since the country’s return to democracy more than 40 years ago. In the next election, it achieved a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers of parliament. The MAS has governed Bolivia for all but one year since, with significant achievements in poverty reduction. Morales and the MAS have become bastions of the Latin American left.

Every Sunday, Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, goes on air for his radio program, Evo Is the People, Leader of the Humble. It’s become required listening for Bolivian political analysts. Among other things, Morales uses the slot to go after his political foes. That means Bolivia’s right-wing opposition, NATO, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But these days, his targets also include the government of his own political party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), and its leader, President Luis Arce.

The power struggle over who will lead the MAS in Bolivia’s 2025 elections has burst into the open. It is already complicating governance, with squabbling in the media and rebellions in parliament. And it is hurting both Arce and Morales’s image among the public. If it reaches the point where they run for separate parties, then they could split the MAS vote; even if it doesn’t, the winner may be too tarnished to secure a majority for the MAS. Either scenario would transform the country’s political scene: After almost two decades in which the MAS has governed alone, Bolivia may return to a more complex picture of coalition government. The conservative opposition, long unable to challenge the MAS at the ballot box, might recover a degree of political power.

When Morales led the MAS to power in 2006, it was the first party to win a majority in Bolivian politics since the country’s return to democracy more than 40 years ago. In the next election, it achieved a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers of parliament. The MAS has governed Bolivia for all but one year since, with significant achievements in poverty reduction. Morales and the MAS have become bastions of the Latin American left.

But the presidential election of 2019 marked a turning point. Morales was running for a third consecutive term, in violation of the constitution and in defiance of a referendum result—something that provoked anger not just among the opposition but within the MAS itself. Morales won the election but with allegations of fraud—later contested—which sparked massive opposition protests. The police mutinied, then the army suggested he resign—and he did, going into exile. A little-known conservative senator, Jeanine Áñez, became president of an interim government—a transition of power that Morales and the MAS view as a U.S.-backed coup. Áñez’s mandate was to call fresh elections, but she soon began to dismantle Morales’s legacy and prosecute his allies. 

When elections were eventually called a year later, the MAS swept back into power under Luis Arce, Morales’s former finance minister and chosen candidate. Morales returned to Bolivia—but rifts within the MAS remained.

At first, at least on the surface, there seemed to be a division of roles: Arce would run the government while Morales, as president of the MAS, would run the party. Arce said he would not seek reelection, and many Bolivians believe the implied agreement was that Morales would return as the MAS’s candidate for the 2025 elections. But now, the signs suggest that both Morales and Arce—and perhaps others—would like to run on the MAS ticket in 2025.

“The MAS was monolithic for 14 years until it suffered a political earthquake with the crisis of 2019,” said Maria Teresa Zegada Claure, a sociologist at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón. “Two years into Arce’s presidency, the divides within the MAS are clear. There are at least two trends: one led by Morales … and the other led by Arce.”

In terms of ideology, there is little difference between the two leaders. Both reject free market policies and seek to grow the state’s role in the economy as well as use Bolivia’s natural resources, such as natural gas and lithium, to fund social programs. On the international stage, their rhetoric is anti-imperialist, and they tend to side with the bloc of powers that includes Cuba and Venezuela, as well as China, Russia, and Iran. But Arce, an economist with a middle-class background, is seen as more technocratic, while Morales, who rose to prominence through a coca growers union, has greater populist appeal, especially among rural workers. The divide is mostly about where supporters’ loyalties lie—and whether they think the MAS needs to move on from Morales.

Tension between these two groups is now threatening to pull the MAS apart, as they trade accusations of corruption, links to drug trafficking, and treason against the people.

The moment of greatest tension came with the conflict in Santa Cruz, a regional opposition stronghold, which began late last October. The detonator was the national government’s delay of a census that would give the region more resources and parliamentary seats to match its growing population. Santa Cruz’s government and civil society mounted a strike that lasted 36 days, snarling the national economy. The protesters stood down after the national government announced it would hold the census and implement its results before the 2025 election. MAS legislators loyal to Morales voted against this proposal, but those loyal to Arce’s government, together with opposition legislators, approved it. Morales accused Arce’s administration of making a pact with the right.

Arce has mostly remained silent in the face of these attacks. “Arce’s strategy is to not engage [with Morales],” said Fernando Mayorga, a sociologist at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón. But many analysts have interpreted the Dec. 28, 2022, arrest of Luis Fernando Camacho—governor of Santa Cruz and leader of one of two national opposition parties—as Arce’s implicit response to Morales. Camacho played a key role not just in mobilizing the recent strike over the census but also in the protests after the contested 2019 election that resulted in Morales’s resignation, which the MAS alleges was a coup. Camacho’s arrest for his role in the events of 2019 now is widely seen by analysts as a strategic move. “Arce may have taken that decision to show the radical wing of the MAS that he hasn’t sold out to the right and that he is in fact even more confrontational with the traditional elite,” Zegada said.

As it stands, it is unclear whether Arce or Morales has the upper hand, as they draw on different, and shifting, sources of support among the MAS and the electorate.

Morales controls the structure and political direction of the MAS as party leader, and he has the support of his ex-ministers, who do not have positions in the current government. Among the populace, he provokes strong feelings in both directions: One survey from last December found that 26 percent of respondents thought he could still be a good president, while 66 percent believed the opposite. Many Bolivians are put off by his desire to hold onto power. But he has a strong base among rural workers’ unions, not least the coca growers of the tropics, whose federation he leads as president. “Morales has a kind of gravitational pull in the rural workers’ world,” said Fernando García Yapur, a Bolivian political analyst. “And then Morales is also seen as a reference for progressivism—not just at the level of the continent but the world.”

Arce lacks Morales’s charisma and social base, but many Bolivians see him as a safe bet to guide the economy—a perception fed by Bolivia’s strong growth during Morales’s governments, when Arce was the economy minister, and its remarkably low inflation rate since he became president. This was the main reason given by respondents when Arce’s approval ratings approached 50 percent last September. But Arce’s handling of the census conflict—and then the arrest of Camacho—appeared unpopular: By the end of 2022, his approval ratings had tumbled to 26 percent.

Primaries for the MAS to choose its presidential candidate are set to take place in 2024. But the tension may come to a head before then. After the passing of the census law, Arce gave a speech in which he criticized “those among my own ranks who want to cut short my mandate,” alluding to his supporters’ suspicion that Morales’s camp would perhaps prefer to create the conditions for a change of leadership as soon as this year. This could theoretically happen through a revocatoria, a constitutional mechanism that can allow citizens to vote to depose a president and trigger new elections—a possibility raised by various supporters of Morales. Two weeks ago, audio was released by a Bolivian TV channel in which Morales appeared to discuss it, though he has claimed the audio was manipulated.

The problems for governance created by these tensions may only get worse. The decision by MAS legislators loyal to Morales to vote against Arce’s government on the census law—and also, at first, the 2023 budget—could be just the start. Then there is speculation that the MAS may expel Arce from the party or that Arce may jump ship and run as candidate for the Partido Socialista-1, a left-wing party that he was associated with as a student. If Arce and Morales do end up running for different parties and therefore splitting the MAS vote, then it could mark the end of a 20-year cycle in Bolivian politics, in which the MAS has been able to govern almost without need for compromise, and perhaps signal a return to an array of smaller, more issue-specific parties jostling and bargaining for power.

The MAS may yet find a way to settle its internal tensions before then with a political agreement that binds it together. This could be prompted by the emergence of a credible threat from the opposition, which, since the MAS first took power, has never managed to unite around a candidate that could challenge it. But such an agreement could not recreate the unity there used to be. And in any case, it might be short-lived. The bitterness of this dispute—and the deep-seated tensions it has unearthed—won’t be quickly forgotten.