The Implosion of a Party

The collapse was apparent during the first electoral round in August, when the MAS, the most powerful political force of the past fifty years, plunged from enjoying a legislative majority to holding just one seat. “We are in shock,” says Freddy Condo, a former consultant to social movement organizations affiliated with the MAS. “It’s going to take us at least a year to absorb what happened and develop new strategies.”

The astounding demise was driven by popular anger at the current MAS government led by economist Luis Arce. His administration oversaw a profound and worsening economic crisis driven by rising prices, fuel shortages, and a scarcity of US dollars.

MAS support also disintegrated due to steadily intensifying infighting between Arce and former president Morales. As a result, three different MAS factions contested the August elections. The MAS began as the political instrument of rural union organizations and, once in office, proclaimed itself a “government of social movements.” This lack of institutional party structures served to accelerate its process of disintegration.

The three factions battled for votes among those Bolivians who had become increasingly disillusioned with the MAS-led process of change. “The MAS governed for ten years based on its political commitments and convictions,” says Condo. “But after 2016, it was distorted by individualism, self-interest, and corruption.”

In 2016, Morales narrowly lost a referendum that would have allowed him to run again for reelection. When Morales’s supporters in the constitutional court ruled that he could run anyway, discontent with the MAS intensified, especially among the urban middle classes, helping to set the stage for the 2019 far-right coup.

MAS infighting surged after its return to power — and the country’s return to democracy — with the resounding 2020 election win by Morales’s former minister of economy, Arce, who had managed the economy during the commodity boom that financed the MAS’s programs. Seen as a good administrator, Arce won 55 percent of the vote a year after a 2019 coup ousted Morales. Morales saw Arce as a transitional candidate, paving the way for him to run again in 2025, but Arce and his vice president, David Choquehuanca, quickly forged their own path.

This quarrel produced a severe rupture within the MAS that became more rancorous as time went on. The all-consuming fight meant the MAS neglected to respond to significant societal changes that their policies, in no small measure, had helped bring to life. “Because the focus of the MAS factions was on destroying each other, the right wing was able to successfully construct a narrative that the last twenty years have been a failure,” says former vice minister of planning Alberto Borda. In the first round, the far-right Tuto also mobilized Bolivia’s deep-seated racism in his bid for support.

Many votes that once went to the MAS coalesced around the Paz-Lara ticket. Political scientist Fernando Mayorga calculates that about 30 percent of the vote of politically committed Bolivians in any election will be for left-wing and indigenous candidates. “Another 20 percent voted for the MAS in good times but shifted to Paz and Lara in this election,” he says.

The swing to Paz was in large part thanks to his commitment to preserve social programs established by the MAS, which have contributed to a significant reduction in poverty and income inequality and the growth of the middle class. Paz also made the perennial commitment to curtail bribery and patronage, and he also vowed to uphold the MAS government’s refusal to solicit an International Monetary Fund bailout — a campaign promise he isn’t particularly likely to keep.

Paz has indicated that rebuilding relations with the United States will be a priority, sixteen years after Morales’s government expelled US officials for meddling in Bolivia’s internal affairs. After kicking out the ambassador Philip Goldberg and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in 2008, Morales expelled the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in 2013, which served as an instrument of US coca eradication policy.

Largely empty for years, the mammoth fortress that is the US embassy in La Paz could welcome a new ambassador in a matter of months. His or her focus will likely be the same as that of the US government officials in Bolivia since the 1980s: the eradication of coca leaf, an essential ingredient in the production of cocaine. A condition of reestablishing diplomatic relations could be the reopening of the country to the DEA, raising the specter of US drug policy linked to human rights violations and political instability in the 1990s.

Despite its stunning disintegration, the once hegemonic MAS has overseen a democratic transition of power, even though it has come at the cost of the party. “In the past, political parties were much stronger,” says Mayorga. But Bolivia has a high level of voting participation even given mandatory voting, which he argues “demonstrates that people strongly believe in democracy, and in their ability to change the course of the country through the polls.”

Roots of the Crisis

Underlying the current economic crisis lies Bolivia’s deeply entrenched patterns of extractivist dependence, which were not shaken during the nearly two decades of MAS governance. If anything, more advanced technologies and surging demand from China has increased exploitation of the country’s abundant natural resources, particularly in environmentally destructive artisanal gold mining and industrial soy production.  Deforestation, driven by the expansion of Bolivia’s largest agricultural export, soy, is accelerating rapidly to alarming levels.

Declines in commodity prices and in natural gas reserves, catastrophically low international financial reserves, and particularly a shortage of dollars have increased the price of basic commodities. “In the villages near here, people are down to eating two meals a day because food prices have skyrocketed,” says Alvaro Rodriguez, a university student from Sacaba, a town just east of Cochabamba.

After the MAS took over the government in 2006, it faced the problems of a historically weak state lacking in basic administrative capacity. The MAS expanded the state significantly, but it still tended to be dominated by nepotism and patronage. Bolivia’s powerful social movements became integrated into these governmental structures, causing them to steadily lose their independence from the state.

Particularly in urban areas, “the depoliticization of the poor and working class left a space for the right wing to increasingly shape the dominant narrative,” says Andrés Huanca, who ran as a candidate for the MAS faction headed by young union leader and president of the Senate Andrónico Rodríguez. This process was hastened by growing individualism in the Americas’ most indigenous country, where collectivism’s historic influence in communities and unions has been severely compromised.

Individualism blossomed thanks in part to twenty years of neoliberalism, exacerbated by the hollowing out of rural areas by migration to the cities, often leaving behind only the elderly. Young indigenous people, who are rapidly losing both indigenous language and culture, often only return to the countryside for festivals.

“Going forward, we must reject the current emphasis on individualism and private initiative,” urges Cochabamba feminist Carmen Nuñez. “We need greater recognition of ourselves as workers and more organizing as workers. This process of constantly shifting the responsibility for economic development to the individual has turned the working class toward the right wing.”

Bolivia is now a majority urban country, and city youth, raised in relative economic security thanks to the MAS’s achievements, never experienced the poverty or struggles that defined their parents’ lives. “We need progressive discourses directed to urban young people. The rural movements where the MAS originated are not only less important now, but it often treated the urban areas as little more than a source of votes,” says Huanca.

Much of the MAS’s strength lay in its emphasis on increased indigenous inclusion and participation, wrapped in the commitment to a plurinational state. Over time, the difficulties of implementing a plurinational vision made it little more than symbolic.  As the country became more urban, the idea that the indigenous people would lead a societal regeneration lost its resonance, especially after corruption scandals implicated indigenous government representatives.

Radical social change in Bolivia has often resulted from alliances between working-class and indigenous people with segments of the middle class. “For the radical middle class, belonging to a political party has disappeared. This has weakened our ability to confront the state,” explains Nuñez.

Evo’s Enduring Support

“Evo is still the force to be reckoned with,” says Mayorga. After he was disqualified from running for president, Morales called for a null vote in the August elections, and almost 19 percent of the population complied (normally only 4 percent of ballots are marked void). This was almost double the closest vote for any of the other two left-identified candidates.

Such enduring dedication stems from the outsize role Morales played in transforming the country. Much of it comes from the poor whose lives his government transformed for the better. “They have a debt for life to Evo,” says Mayorga.

“He has been expelled from the part of the MAS that has been in power for the last five years, repeatedly threatened with arrest, and survived what he believes was an assassination attempt,” Mayorga continues. “He has overcome it all and still ended up with largest chunk of the country’s progressive vote.”

Morales, who is already talking about running in 2030, can no longer play the role he once did of articulating between the various factions of the MAS and the popular movements. Nonetheless, he has formed a new, unregistered party called EVO Pueblo (Estamos Volviendo Obedeciendo al Pueblo) that, to date, has only found support among his most faithful followers.

There has been a wholesale rejection of Morales in many quarters, particularly among the newly emergent middle class. “They don’t want to return to poverty, and they think that is where the MAS is heading,” says Reyna. Condo adds, “In Aymara culture, one serves as maximum leader only once. Evo has repeatedly violated that.”

Yet Morales’s enduring appeal, especially among Bolivia’s poor and rural peoples, is impossible to ignore. “A leader like Evo doesn’t appear very often,” says Borda wistfully. “But now he threatens to destroy all that the MAS built.”

A Path to the Future?

Even though left and indigenous forces are in a state of disarray, when the Paz-Lara government tries to right the economy through economic measures that will predictably fall on the poor, there is little doubt that Bolivians will rebel as they have done for centuries. As happened so often in the pre-MAS era, the absence of a left in the legislative assembly capable of moderating harsh economic proposals will almost certainly encourage the resurfacing of vibrant protest in the streets.

The hope is that this will breathe new life into the popular movements and enable them to remobilize. But there is a fear that persistent divisions on the Left — as well as the polarization of opinions on Morales, once the posterchild of the Latin American left — will derail the process.

Reunification across MAS factions is on the table but unlikely to happen in the short term. Regional and municipal elections are coming up in March 2026, and diverse groups are working hard to put forward progressive candidates in different parts of the country, but finding dependable party structures to sponsor them remains a challenge.

The astonishing collapse of the MAS means a reckoning is in order, and this will take time. “It turned out the MAS was not capable of profoundly changing the state, and in the end, it became a bourgeois state like any other,” concludes Nuñez. “That failure came back to bite them. It is essential that we learn from this experience so we can construct a viable alternative.”