A disintegrated left establishment, worsening economic crisis and resurgent right wing marked the first round of Bolivia’s elections on August 17, which spelt the end of the Movement Towards Socialism’s (MAS) 20 years in power.
Two right-wing candidates, Rodrigo Paz and Jorge Quiroga, received 32.1% and 26.7% of votes respectively, and will contest the presidential runoff vote on October 19. Both represent the interests of big business, free-market capitalism and the economic oligarchy looking to reimpose a neoliberal free-for-all in the country.
Paz ran on an electoral platform of “capitalism for all”, promising to lower taxes and close state-owned companies. Much of Paz’ success is credited to his running mate, Edmand Lara, a former police officer with a big following on TikTok, Bolivia’s most popular social media platform. Lara promoted an “anti-corruption” agenda, citing far-right Salvadorean President Nayib Bukele as inspiration. Paz and Lara presented themselves as a revitalised and “modernised” right, distancing themselves from the traditional right.
Quiroga, on the other hand, represents the traditional wing of the Bolivian right, tied directly to United States capital and the country’s oligarchy, particularly those longing for a return to the brutal neoliberal “adjustment” period of the 1980s and ’90s. He served as vice-president in the government of ex-dictator Hugo Bánzer, who led a repressive US-backed military regime in the 1970s and later returned as an elected president in 1997.
Quiroga’s proposals include implementing a sweeping austerity regime, abolishing communal land titles, re-establishing relations with Israel and seeking massive loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
The ruling MAS party — which had easily won four of the last elections since 2005 — suffered a crushing defeat. MAS failed to win any seats in Bolivia’s upper house and only secured two seats in the 130-seat lower house, where it previously held 75. MAS presidential candidate Eduardo del Castillo received just 3% of the vote, while MAS overall barely surpassed the 3% threshold needed to avoid being dissolved under Bolivian electoral law.
The history of MAS
MAS first emerged out of the coca growers’ struggles of the 1980s and ’90s, with Evo Morales — himself a coca farmer — as a leading figure. It was formed as the electoral arm of grassroots and Indigenous movements and swept to power in 2005 after mass uprisings against water and gas privatisations. The rejection of neoliberalism was central to its rise.
While stopping short of fully nationalising Bolivia’s gas industry, MAS massively increased royalties, using revenues to fund social programs, expand healthcare and education programs and reduce poverty. Between 2006–18, the MAS government cut poverty by 42% and extreme poverty by 60%, while also raising literacy rates and life expectancy.
A 2006 land reform redistributed 3.9 million hectares to 56,000 mostly peasant and Indigenous families by 2010. Before this reform, 66% of potentially productive land was owned by less than 1% of landholders. MAS’s early years combined redistributive policies with recognition of Indigenous rights, capturing enormous legitimacy among the poor majority.
So, how did MAS — which as recently as 2020 won 55% of the vote and a supermajority in government — collapse so comprehensively?
Some focus on the public feud between Morales and President Luis Arce — who served as Morales’ finance minister for more than a decade and won the presidency in the 2020 elections — over control of the MAS party. This led to huge divisions between the party leadership and its supporter bases, with Morales eventually openly confronting the Arce government through mobilising road blockades and marches.
Barred from running in this year’s election due to constitutional term limits, Morales called on Bolivians to spoil their votes in protest. This had a measurable influence: invalid votes surged to almost 20%, compared to the average of 3.5%.
Effectively, votes on the leftist electoral field were split between the pro-Arce candidate that ran on the official MAS ticket, the pro-Morales null votes, and the 8% of votes that went to Andrónico Rodríguez, a young MAS senator and coca growers' union leader who distanced himself from Arce but was declared a "traitor" by Morales for running on an alternative list.
Failures
However, the splitting of left votes does not explain the overall disillusionment with the governing MAS.
Morales stifled new leadership from emerging, maintaining himself as the central figure of MAS. To some extent, social movements were co-opted into the government, reducing autonomy and undermining grassroots movements.
MAS, especially under Arce, increasingly alienated many of the social forces that had originally brought it to power.
Indicative of this is that the Unified Syndical Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia — the powerful union confederation that was once the cornerstone of MAS — was split between a faction that backed Rodríguez and another that called for a null vote. None, however, supported the official MAS candidate.
MAS also failed to break from Bolivia’s extractivist economic model, maintaining the economy’s dependence on primary commodity exports.
While resource revenues funded redistribution, they left the country vulnerable to global price fluctuations. Falling international gas prices since 2015 massively reduced the value of Bolivia’s exports — foreign currency reserves were depleted as a result. To maintain its subsidies, the government borrowed heavily and reduced fuel imports, leading to widespread shortages.
Since the end of 2023, inflation soared from about 2% to more than 20%. This, coupled with the fuel shortages, generated disillusionment with the MAS’ ability to navigate the economic crisis.
MAS’s downfall highlights the limits of left-wing electoral success without moving towards fundamentally changing the social and economic bases of society. MAS failed to meaningfully dismantle the state inherited from centuries of colonialism and elite rule.
But to attribute MAS’s fall purely to internal errors overlooks the deeper constraints it faced over the past 20 years. Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in Latin America, long subjected to colonial exploitation and integration into the global capitalist order as a primary commodity exporter.
The global division of labour enforced by imperialism deliberately locks Global South economies into dependence. The dominance of international finance, trade regimes and corporate control of resources systematically stunts and destroys attempts to industrialise and overcome the reliance on primary exports.
Any government seeking to redistribute wealth or challenge oligarchic power faces enormous resistance. MAS faced relentless sabotage from Bolivia’s elites and from the US, which has always sought to extinguish threats to its imperialist interests.
US imperialism
Through the misnamed National Endowment for Democracy and US Agency for International Development, the US government funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars to opposition groups.
Between 2002–09, USAID gave at least US$97 million to “decentralisation” and “regional autonomy” projects and opposition political parties in Bolivia. The money mainly went to Bolivia’s Santa Cruz region, home to much of the agribusiness and mining oligarchy, to support their efforts to shatter government authority threatening their profits.
This culminated in an attempted coup in 2008, fully supported by the US, which was defeated by mass mobilisations.
USAID was finally expelled from the country in 2013, but US efforts to undermine MAS continued.
The Organization of American States — controlled by the US to advance its imperial interests — triggered a coup that ousted Morales in 2019 by making false claims of electoral fraud. The US government supported the subsequent military dictatorship, until mass uprisings forced the coup regime to call elections that returned the MAS to government in October 2020.
Now, the US tech oligarchy is licking its lips at the prospect of Bolivia’s enormous lithium reserves — part of the so-called “lithium triangle” along with Chile and Argentina — being handed over for plundering. US billionaire Elon Musk, whose company Tesla relies on cheap lithium to manufacture batteries, was honest about US imperialist ambitions following the 2019 coup: “We will coup whoever we want!”
However, the impending neoliberal assault will undoubtedly be met with resistance — Bolivia’s grassroots and Indigenous movements have an enormous capacity to mobilise protest, as they did during the 1990s and early 2000s.
MAS’s electoral defeat is not the defeat of the Bolivian left. While the right may be resurgent, the resistance that toppled dictatorships, defeated coups and brought Indigenous and working-class movements to government remains.