How Bolivia’s left returned to power months after Morales was forced out

Two agonising weeks had passed since Evo Morales was driven from Bolivia and in his vice-president’s recently vacated chambers one of their party’s rising stars sat, crestfallen and drained.

“It hurts,” confessed Eva Copa, the 32-year-old senate president from Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (Mas), her voice breaking and tears filling her eyes as she pondered what some thought might prove a fatal blow to their pro-indigenous project. “What has happened will leave scars.”

Bolivia election: Evo Morales’s leftwing party celebrates stunning comeback

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Visibly exhausted, Copa admitted the outlook was uncertain, for her movement and Bolivia as a whole. “The last thing the Bolivian people want is more chaos,” she said.

But the young senator was adamant Mas could, and would rebuild. “We don’t need to refound ourselves. What we’re going to do is reorganise,” Copa said. “We have faith we’ll pull through this.”

That faith was well-placed. On Friday morning authorities confirmed a stunning political comeback with Mas’s candidate, the former finance minister Luis Arce, winning Sunday’s presidential election by a thumping 26.3% margin.

His closest rival in the re-run of last October’s voided ballot, the centrist ex-president Carlos Mesa, received 28.8% of the 6.48m votes compared to Arce’s 55.1%. There was a record voter turnout of 88.4%.

Bolivian sociologist Jorge Derpic recalled thinking at the height of last year’s turmoil that “a total collapse” of Morales’s movement was possible.

“That’s why this moment is so impressive and unexpected,” Derpic said. “They have shown [the ability] to overcome the very worst moment of their 25-year history. Not every party is able to survive [something like that]. It is really impressive.”

There are many complex threads to the tale of Mas’ bounce back from last year’s nightmare, when security forces drove Morales into exile after he tried to extend his 14-year stint as president in defiance of a 2016 referendum.

But at the heart of the story are a succession of spectacular miscalculations and misteps by Mas’ opponents – and above all the caretaker administration of Jeanine Áñez, who took power two days after Morales left Bolivia on 10 November 2019.

As interim president Áñez had a simple mandate: to lead Bolivia peacefully towards fresh elections. Instead, with the help of her hardline interior minister Arturo Murillo, the conservative Christian set about pursuing Morales supporters and alienating Bolivia’s indigenous majority with a display of Bible bashing and brute force.

“They showed so much vindictiveness against the Mas and the impact [on indigenous voters] was dramatic because a lot of people basically said: ‘Look, these guys are not only going to go after Evo, they’re going to go after everybody who looks like Evo,’” Gamarra said.

Derpic said Áñez’s decision to herself run for president – only abandoning her bid on the eve of the election – caused further alarm. Some feared the right would lead Bolivia back into dictatorship and used Sunday’s vote to say no. “There was part of Bolivian society who, despite the disappointment and anger and frustration with the Mas, wanted to preserve democracy,” Derpic said.

But Mas’s resurrection also speaks to its own strengths: its powerful connection to Bolivia’s indigenous populations and working classes, and how it savvily reinvented itself to win back voters disillusioned with Morales’s refusal to relinquish power.

“They ran an intelligent campaign … and probably the most important thing was that they separated themselves from Evo,” said Gamarra.

With Morales exiled to Argentina after what supporters declared a coup, Arce pitched himself as an efficient and thoughtful leader who could bring social and economic stability to a divided nation facing a dire economic outlook and one of the world’s worst Covid-19 crises.

“He’s softly-spoken. He’s not antagonistic. He’s not full of rage and rhetoric – and that went over well,” said Gamarra, who thought Arce’s reputation as the finance minister who oversaw Bolivia’s commodity-fuelled boom in the 2000s was key.

“Jeanine could have emerged as the woman who stabilized the country,” he concluded. “Instead, I think she’s politically dead now and Murillo is probably going to be brought up on charges and will have to leave Bolivia because he has antagonised so many people.”

One man almost certain to return is Morales, although Arce has insisted Bolivia’s first indigenous president will have no role his government.

Jim Shultz, the founder of the Bolivia-focused Democracy Centre, said a burning question was whether Bolivia was entering an Arce presidency or a Morales one: “I think there might be a struggle over the answer.”

The prospect of Morales continuing to wield influence would disturb many Bolivians, including some Masistas who complain of an authoritarian drift and growing corruption in the latter years of his time in power.

Derpic, however, thought Arce’s triumph – which was even more convincing that the 2005 landslide that first brought Morales to power – was so convincing it gave him the upper hand.

“Arce defeated not only the opposition, but also Morales,” he said. “This idea that they couldn’t win [and election] without Morales has been shattered and I think that’s a great thing for the Mas and Bolivian society in general.”

Derpic said the message from voters to Morales was crystal clear: “Evo, take a break, relax in Argentina – or Chapare if you want. [But] don’t try to be the centrepiece of the government.

“I think that that is something to celebrate,” he said. “We’ll see if things stay like that.”