Former President Evo Morales Hors Course – Liberation
It is a small earthquake in Bolivian political life. Evo Morales will not be a candidate in the presidential election in August. For several days, the ex-president acknowledged that he had not found an agreement with a political party to apply. On Monday, May 19, when his delegates tried to register him with the Supreme Electoral Court, they found a closed door.
The difficulties of the former president in registering are explained by the functioning of the Bolivian electoral system. To be a candidate, you must be registered by a political party having announced its participation in the elections. This gives rise to ghost political parties, almost without militants, but which reappear in each election by lending their name to a candidate. Morales intended to present himself for one of them, the Bolivian National Action Party (Pan-Bol), but he saw his legal status suppressed in early May.
The disappointments of morals date back several months. In February, He had lost control of the movement towards socialism (Mas), a party of which he had been the president since 1997 and with whom he had won the presidential elections of 2006, 2009 and 2014. Consequently, the ex-president had signed an agreement with one of these nominee political parties, the front for victory, but the agreement was broken after a month.
Even if the former president had been able to register in the presidential election, it was very unlikely that the electoral court validates this candidacy. Indeed, a decision of the Constitutional Court of 2023 limits the number of presidential mandates for two, in all and for everything. A situation which only concerns evo moral in Bolivia.
The consequences of this non-candidacy are numerous and still difficult to assess. First of all, the supporters of Morals will not accept this situation without flinching. Friday, May 16, several thousand of them came to La Paz to put pressure on the electoral court and register their candidate – without success. New events or even road blockages In the Chaparé, the stronghold of Moralesare likely.
At the political and electoral level, the absence of a candidacy of morals makes the result of the August election even more uncertain. A significant quantity of voters is orphan of his candidate and a postponement of voice to another candidate on the left is not at all guaranteed, because of the fratricidal struggle within the left Bolivian with the current president, Luis Arce, for at least two years. Evo Morales also served as a lightning rod of the criticisms of the various opposition candidates who had built an anti-moral and anti-masse discourse. It is therefore the whole political class which is assigned, in one way or another, by this situation. However, it is still too early to speak of a political death of the former president: his political, symbolic and also electoral weight remains very important in the country.
