Bolivian President Luis Arce announced on May 13th that he would not run for re-election in the August elections. The president—embroiled in an internal dispute within the ruling Movement For Socialism (MAS) party alongside former president (2006-2019) Evo Morales—called on the former president to follow the same path and withdraw his candidacy. Morales was barred from running for office by a court ruling in November 2024.
Arce issued an urgent call for unity on the left around the candidate with the best chances of confronting opposition parties. At the same time, he asked Morales to also renounce his presidential aspirations and called on MAS Senate leader Andrónico Rodríguez, who has already announced his candidacy, to join in the effort to unify the ruling leftist coalition.
“We either defend our Plurinational State and its popular achievements, or we facilitate the return of the right to government,” he emphasized, positioning himself against what he sees as a coalition of "fascists," "imperialists," and "looters."
Arce had been the leading candidate for the MAS, and was set to announce its presidential ticket this Sunday at a mass event in El Alto, a city neighboring the capital of La Paz. The event has now been postponed.
The MAS now has few options with name recognition and political experience, beyond Andrónico, raising questions about Arce's successor.
What Will Morales Do?
Morales, who led the ruling party for nearly three decades, was removed from the leadership of MAS in November 2024, after a judicial ruling and the electoral authority recognized Grover García, an ally of Arce, as the new president of the party.
Subsequently, Morales resigned from MAS, founded the Evo Pueblo bloc, started doing rallies across the country, and stated that he would run as a presidential candidate with a “borrowed” political party, the identity of which he has not yet revealed. It is unclear whether he would be allowed to be president were he to win.
A Moment of Division
Divisions within the ruling party worsened two weeks ago when Andrónico Rodríguez, once seen as Morales’s successor, decided to distance himself from the former head of state and accept a presidential candidacy.
The key for the MAS will be to unite the fractured leftist bloc between Evistas and Arcistes by proposing a progress-oriented vision to get the country out of its current crises, while attacking the right's disruption and solutions.
Meanwhile, the opposition also remains divided between a few candidates with vastly different visions, and has not succeeded in presenting a unifier to challenge MAS. The main opposition figures remain Manfred Reyes Villa, Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, and Samuel Doria Medina.
Arce's withdrawal presents a unique chance for the right to win the presidency, if they can unify, as the MAS has dominated Bolivian national politics for the last two decades.
Main Election Issues
The 2025 campaign has been dominated by Bolivia’s worst economic crisis since the 1990s, marked by runaway inflation, a collapsing peso, dwindling foreign reserves, rising insecurity and instability, and a deepening dollarization crisis.
An ongoing energy crunch has forced the country to seek new fuel imports from Russia, while foreign investment—especially in lithium extraction—has sharply declined due to political instability and regulatory uncertainty.
Whether the country should align more closely with China, Russia, and the BRICS, or attempt to repair its relationship with the United States and the West, also remains a significant source of contention between the candidates.
The Candidates and Their Campaigns
President Arce had focused his campaign on stabilizing the economy and defending state-led development, which helped expand universal social programs and lift people out of poverty.
Arce’s MAS predecessor Evo Morales has leaned on nationalist and anti-imperialist rhetoric, emphasizing sovereignty over lithium and indigenous identity, while boasting his past economic programs that largely helped reduce economic and social inequalities, also supporting closer ties with China and joining the BRICS.
Senate President Andrónico Rodríguez has campaigned on generational renewal and unity, while remaining vague on policy specifics, and has warned against Evo’s more divisive, aggressive brand of politics, which may detract foreign investment and cause further political instability.
In the opposition, frontrunner and potential unity candidate Manfred Reyes Villa, the mayor of Cochabamba, has prioritized restoring investor confidence, cracking down on crime, and reorienting Bolivia’s foreign policy away from Russia and toward the U.S. and regional allies.
For his part, Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, former president from 2001 to 2002, has highlighted economic liberalization, advocating for the privatization of state-owned enterprises, fiscal austerity, and engagement with international financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank. Quiroga also aims to realign Bolivia's foreign policy away from alliances with Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, favoring stronger ties with Western democracies.
Samuel Doria Medina, a centrist businessman who ran twice for president in the past, has focused his campaign on economic liberalization, foreign investment—especially in lithium—and reducing state control over the economy.
Fringe candidate Chi Hyun Chung, a Korean-Bolivian evangelical Christian pastor and doctor who also ran unsuccessfully in 2019 and 2020, has promoted moral conservatism, harsh anti-crime measures, and pro-market reforms, while courting religious voters.
Where Polling Stands
Recent polling showed Arce still leading in national voting intentions prior to his withdrawal, closely followed by Evo Morales - though he maintains a strong and vocal voter base, his support has been slowly dwindling.
Meanwhile, right-leaning polls placed Manfred Reyes Villa at the top of the opposition field. Reyes Villa has been holding rallies across the country and positioning himself as a unifying figure on the right. Medina and Quiroga are still behind but may surge as Reyes Villa is embroiled in scandals over his city’s waste management crisis and his past support for the military dictatorship.
Chi Hyun Chung is likely to continue to be a fringe candidate for the extreme right, concentrated in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, modeling himself after other similar figures in the Americas including Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, though likely only taking a few percentage points from the opposition.
Meanwhile, it remains unclear who will carry the left’s banner—whether Evo Morales, who faces mounting legal and political challenges, or Andrónico Rodríguez, a relatively young Senate leader who has emerged as a key figure within the Plurinational Assembly, or perhaps an outsider candidate.
For now, the field remains quite divided, with no clear frontrunner, having only three months to go until the election. The key takeaway, as voiced by both the left and the right, will be to unify the fractured country around a vision for the future, as Bolivia navigates perhaps its worst crisis period in decades. If either the right or the left decides to run a divided campaign, separating their bloc's votes between multiple candidates, they will surely lose, as happened with the right in nearly every previous election of the past two decades - whoever can unite around a single candidate will win.
Joseph Bouchard is a journalist and researcher from Québec covering security and geopolitics in Latin America. His articles have appeared in Reason, The Diplomat, The National Interest, Le Devoir, and Responsible Statecraft, among others. He is an incoming PhD student in Politics at the University of Virginia and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow on Latin American Politics.
