For months, a power struggle between former President Evo Morales and his successor, Luis Arce, has been growing in Bolivia, which could end in a breakup in the 2025 presidential elections.
Morales, president from 2006 to 2019, announced his candidacy for a new term while Arce, Minister of Economy until 2017 and his successor, still has two years left at the head of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) government.
“They have convinced me, I am going to be a candidate, they have forced me, the people want,” said the former president on Sunday a few days before the MAS congress on October 3, which is expected to be attended only by his followers, an example of the division. inside the party.
“Compelled by the government’s attacks, their plan to ban the MAS-IPSP [Movimiento al Socialismo – Instrumento por la Soberanía de los Pueblos] and defenestrate us with political processes, even physically eliminating us, we have decided to accept the requests of our militancy,” Morales said.
Arce, who has not yet announced that he will seek re-election, is avoiding direct confrontation for the moment.
In any case, he participated this Monday in a meeting with the Unity Pact, made up of the five social organizations that make up the MAS, which anticipated that it will not know the results of the next congress that Morales will lead as president of the party.
The former president responded by accusing the government of trying to stop his candidacy. “In the last few hours we have seen how the government and the separatist extreme right agree in opposing this candidacy promoted by the people,” he wrote on the social network X.
Morales led the country for almost 14 years until he left Bolivia in 2019 following elections that were marked by accusations of fraud. The leader denounced a coup d’état with the support of the United States and went into exile.
After an 11-month interim government, Arce achieved a decisive victory in the October 2020 elections, thus ushering in the return of the former president. But enthusiasm only guaranteed a few months of calm. It was at the end of 2021 that the division began to grow like a wall between the two leaders of the Movement towards Socialism.
At BBC Mundo we review 3 moments that show the division within the party.
1. The autonomy of President Arce
After the 2020 elections, in which the MAS returned to government, Morales felt he could continue influencing his former minister. Only a few months passed, until Morales’ demands to change some of the ministers began to grow.
Arce listened, but didn’t want to respond. Then, the president turned the survival of one of his ministers, Eduardo Del Castillo, into a show of personal strength before the former president.
Last June, Arce reacted to the Assembly’s decision to sanction Del Castillo by majority for alleged trafficking of stolen vehicles in Chile in order to force him to leave his position.
Arce felt the coordination of Morales’ deputies with the opposition as a betrayal. For this reason, he decided to keep Del Castillo in office, which further activated the division within MAS.
Del Castillo has been one of the ministers who has faced the most opposition from the evistas. The former president assures that he must displace Del Castillo “for the good of the president.”
In an example of the dispute in the ruling party, after the sanction of the Assembly against the minister, Arce swore Del Castillo again after signing two decrees, one that dismissed him and another that restored him to office, which some politicians called it “unconstitutional.”
But this is not the only resignation that Morales demands.
He also requests that of Vice President David Choquehuanca, who has long distanced himself from Morales and who, according to the former president, is not “on the front line” to defend the Arce government.
2. The Parted Assembly
President Arce does not have a majority bloc in Congress. Added to the friction between the leaders is the rupture between the representatives of his political bloc.
Arce’s government lost the special majority in the Assembly that allowed it to approve some key laws due to the MAS split between evistas and arcistas.
Doctor in Political Science Fernando Mayorga explains that the fracture of the ruling bloc caused parliamentarians sympathetic to Morales to have advanced in agreements with the opposition to block decisions of the Executive or censure ministers, which has been bothering Arce for months.
“This implies a weakening of presidential decisionism, which can have negative consequences for Arce’s management. That would be a negative institutional effect in this factional dispute,” says Mayorga.
The deputies allied to Morales, like the opposition, decided that they would not approve any project until the judicial elections, which were scheduled for this year, are held and progress is made on a law to regulate the censorship of ministers.
“The breakup of the ruling bloc can have a critical effect. It can lead us to a scenario of institutional blockage. This is when the Assembly systematically blocks or hinders any initiative of the Executive,” explains José Luis Exeni, doctor in Political Science.
3. The peasants’ fight
Chairs flew from one side to the other in the Héroes de Octubre stadium in El Alto, in the early hours of August 19 between the two groups that were fighting to retain the leadership of the largest social organization in Bolivia.
The constellation of unions of the Single Trade Union Confederation of Peasant Workers of Bolivia (Csutcb), which is part of the MAS, had decided to meet to elect their representatives.
But the meeting ended with more than 450 people injured, the intervention of the police and an event never seen before: the union leadership was divided into two factions, one recognized by Arce and the other by Morales.
“We cannot speak in formal terms of a rupture, but it is clear that there are two paths and that each one goes their own way,” Exeni tells BBC Mundo, for whom the division between evistas and arcistas is not so much due to their ideological differences or programmatic but by the leadership of the party.
For Mayorga, the MAS cannot be understood either in its origin or in its deployment as a government party without the leading role of the peasant organizations grouped in the so-called Unity Pact.
The renewal sector led by Arce decided in this Monday’s meeting that it will not hold a parallel congress to that of the MAS, but will question the legitimacy of any result in an open “town hall.”
What can happen now?
The MAS congress in October, although it will not be decisive, will be important to know how the governing party will be organized. Possibly it will be the Superior Electoral Tribunal (TSE) who ends up arbitrating the legitimacy of the results of the party meeting.
This body, which after a long judicial dispute in 2017 allowed Morales’ fourth candidacy for the presidency, must make a report on the MAS congress and endorse the election of the new party leadership, in the event that the Arce sector seek to question the results.
“The TSE should not give in to any of the pressures, because entering into a crisis scenario in the electoral institution would be critical. The only peaceful resolution we have are the elections,” says Exeni, who has been president of the TSE.
On the other hand, the Constitutional Court will once again play a key role in unblocking policy disagreements. This body may be called to interpret the text of the Constitution that says that presidents can be re-elected “once on a continuous basis.”
Which does not clarify whether a former president is qualified to be a candidate again after a period of government, so the Constitutional Court must rule on the validity of the former president’s electoral aspiration.
The leaders of the Six Federations of the Tropics of Cochabamba, a powerful organization of coca producers where Morales was born as a leader, have already warned the Arce government that they will take radical actions in the event that Evo is disqualified from competing in 2025.
At this moment, the different factions of the MAS are fighting in advance for control of the largest party in Bolivia, which implies a risk for this political space.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c98dgqjgrrro, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-27 12:40:05
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