Will Evo Morales sink the left’s hopes in Bolivia’s presidential race?

Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia – Few figures in Bolivia trigger such deeply conflicting passions as Evo Morales, the former coca farmer turned three-term president.

To some, he is the man who lifted two million people from poverty. To others, he is an authoritarian mired in scandal and accusations of corruption.

Six years after his departure from office, however, the country is very different — and so is Morales.

Bolivia is engulfed in an economic crisis, triggered by inflation, low currency reserves and the collapse of its natural gas industry.

Meanwhile, Morales has gone from being the most powerful man in the country to being a political lightning rod, blamed for the fractures that have divided Bolivia's left.

How deep that schism goes is likely to be revealed on Sunday, when Bolivian voters head to the ballot box to elect a new president and Congress members.

Polls indicate a surge in support for right-wing candidates and a decline on the left.

It's a stark reversal for Bolivia's Movement for Socialism, known by the acronym MAS, which has governed the country for much of the past 20 years.

And some experts credit that shift, in part, to a key factor: Morales's unrelenting desire to lead.

Barred from running for a fourth term as president, Morales has instead encouraged his supporters to cast null votes during Sunday's election in protest. Many believe that strategy will ultimately benefit the opposition.

“It’s political suicide. He has reached a level of irrationality that is now irreversible,” said Reymi Ferreira, his former minister of defence.

At the same time, Morales has managed to retain a devoted following, and some of his supporters have threatened to obstruct the vote through roadblocks, demonstrations and, in some cases, violence.

Their slogan is blunt: “Without Evo, there are no elections.”

A champion for rural unions

To understand how Morales might influence the upcoming presidential race is to understand his roots: as part of Bolivia's large Indigenous and rural populations.

More than 40 percent of Bolivians identify as Indigenous, giving the country one of the largest proportions of Indigenous citizens in Latin America. More than a quarter of residents, meanwhile, live in the countryside.

That is where Morales has largely drawn his base of support.

Born to a family of Indigenous Aymara descent in Bolivia's central highlands, Morales emerged as a political leader in the 1980s, representing the country's coca-growing unions.

Farmers had long lamented the international pressure to eradicate their crops: Coca, after all, supplies the raw ingredient for cocaine.

But the threats to the farmers' livelihoods forged them into a powerful political force, with Morales as their principal leader.

“There’s no possible path to governability for the next president if the coca growers’ unions are excluded,” political analyst Luciana Jauregui told Al Jazeera.

In his early career as a politician, Morales led the public resistance against the forced eradication of coca crops. Experts say he channelled the power of the unions into the political party that would eventually become MAS.

He continues to wield strong loyalty in Bolivia's rural areas.

First elected to Congress in 1997, Morales was expelled from his seat only five years later over allegations he incited violence during a coca-growers' protest.

But he leveraged that notoriety to reach even higher echelons of power. In 2005, he won the country's presidential race, making him Bolivia's first contemporary president of Indigenous origin.

Upon taking office, he nationalised the country's fossil fuel industry, increasing state revenue and bolstering economic growth.

Increases to social spending, meanwhile, helped reduce Bolivia's inequality rates, with extreme poverty tumbling from 62.9 percent in 2005 to 40.9 percent in 2012.

Morales's fall from power

Such reforms allowed Morales to be successfully re-elected twice.

His decline, however, began in 2016, when an ex-girlfriend was implicated in an investigation into influence peddling and illicit enrichment.

"In 2016, a severe rupture occurred, and his personal legitimacy eroded," Jauregui, the political analyst, explained.

"The mythologised image of Indigenous identity and Morales collapsed, undermining his legitimacy."

That same year, voters narrowly rejected a referendum that would have allowed Morales to seek a fourth term.

But in late 2017, his party appealed to the country's highest court, the Constitutional Tribunal. Party leaders argued it was Morales's "human right" to run for a fourth term — and the court sided with them.

The ruling led to mass protests, with activists shouting slogans like, "Democracy, yes! Dictatorship, no!"

"The problem for MAS and the government began then," said Ferreira, who served under Morales from 2015 to 2018. "With a five-judge ruling, they ignored the vote of millions.”

Morales's 2019 re-election attempt ultimately ended with accusations of fraud and the president himself fleeing the country.

He and his supporters, however, have maintained that the controversy amounted to a coup d'etat.

'Not a fleeting star'

In 2020, however, the election of Morales's former economy minister, Luis Arce, gave the exiled leader an opening to return to Bolivia.

Two days after Arce took office as president, Morales made a triumphant homecoming, leading a caravan of 800 vehicles on a three-day trip across the coca-growing regions of the country.

That ability to mobilise rural voters makes Morales a force to contend with even now, according to his supporters.

“Evo continues to hold a position of importance," said Adriana Salvatierra, a former president of the Senate and one of Morales’s most loyal allies.

"He’s not a fleeting star. His leadership has been key in transforming Bolivia’s history and the lives of many people."

But Morales has maintained his ambitions of serving a fourth term as president, planting the seeds for the left's discord ahead of the 2025 elections.

Morales technically cannot run. In 2023, the Constitutional Tribunal reversed its earlier decision and placed a two-term cap on the presidency. Courts have rejected Morales's appeals ever since.

The ex-president has also had to contend with high-profile scandals, including allegations of statutory rape that has resulted in an ongoing warrant for his arrest.

But Morales has still clashed with Arce and other presidential hopefuls, leading to a split in the leftist coalition — and ambiguity over whom to vote for.

At one point, in 2024, Morales and an ally of Arce, Grover Garcia, both claimed to be president of MAS after separate party elections. A court ultimately ruled in Garcia's favour.

Some experts have blamed the schism on the cult of personality that developed around Morales, shielding him from criticism and feeding his authoritarian tendencies.

Ferreira, for instance, believes Morales fell victim to an inner circle that “turned him into a deity and made him lose touch with humility and reality".

Jauregui, the political analyst, likewise observed that Morales's iron grip on MAS posed a hurdle for the party.

“MAS had faced many problems before, but a key feature was that Morales’s leadership remained insulated," Jauregui said.

A successor to Morales?

Morales ultimately left MAS and founded a new political party in January this year, further splintering the left.

But he has continued to attack prominent left-wing rivals for the presidency, including President Arce, whose candidacy suffered amid Bolivia's recent economic downturn.

In May, Arce ended his re-election campaign, blaming political infighting.

In a statement announcing his withdrawal, Arce wrote, "I do so with the clearest conviction that I will not be a factor in dividing the popular vote, much less facilitate the making of a fascist right-wing project."

He added: "We must put the interests of the homeland and the people first, above personal and short-term electoral ambitions."

In recent months, Andronico Rodriguez has emerged as the left's best hope in the upcoming presidential race.

A 36-year-old senator, Rodriguez, like Morales, boasts a background leading a coca growers' union. Morales himself once presented Rodriguez as his political heir.

However, their relationship ruptured when Rodriguez announced his candidacy for the presidency.

Morales has since slammed Rodriguez as a lackey for "the empire" — a term he uses to denounce foreign interests like the United States.

"I understand that some colleagues, senators and representatives from Andronico are now calling out, 'We must unite,'" Morales said in July on his radio show.

"I don't understand this double talk. I don't know if it's a lack of ethics."

In another public appearance, Morales also accused Rodriguez of being an instrument of the political right: "The right and the empire are using Andronico to divide us."

It is unclear how much those attacks have whittled away at Rodriguez's support.

On August 8, the newspaper El Deber released a survey showing Rodriguez trailing his right-wing competitors by a wide margin.

Fewer than 9 percent of respondents backed Rodriguez, compared with more than 20 percent for both businessman Samuel Doria Medina and former President Jorge Quiroga.

That said, Jauregui, the analyst, is sceptical of how much of the overall shift away from Bolivia's left is due to Morales's sway.

"I think his leadership is overestimated," Jauregui said. "His ability to influence is now quite limited."

Still, she added, it's too early to count Morales out altogether. “The real question is how much capacity Evo has to delegitimise the next government."