Bolivia is the only country in the world that elects its top judges by popular vote—but the judicial elections that should have taken place in 2023 never did. Whether and when these elections happen is now the crux of a power struggle between President Luis Arce and former President Evo Morales, since it may be the courts that determine which of them is the candidate for the Movement Toward Socialism, or MAS, party in next year’s presidential election.
Though now rivals, the two men were once allies. Arce was Morales’ finance minister until 2019, when Morales ran for an unconstitutional third consecutive term. He won the election, but allegations of fraud—later contested—sparked massive protests. Under pressure from the army, Morales resigned and went into exile. When fresh elections were held in 2020, Morales handpicked Arce as the MAS candidate. The party swept back into power, and Morales subsequently returned to Bolivia, eyeing the 2025 election.
But it soon became clear that Arce planned to run for a second term as well, and their resulting battle to control the MAS, by far the country’s most dominant political party, ahead of the election has reverberated through Bolivia’s state and society since then. It has fueled vitriol in the media, where the two men’s followers have traded accusations of treason, corruption and drug trafficking. It has created a logjam in Congress, with Arce’s government struggling to get legislative approval for multilateral loans it has agreed to, due to foot-dragging by lawmakers loyal to Morales. It has split the Indigenous and workers’ organizations that are the backbone of the MAS’ political base into “Arcista” and “Evista” factions. And it has put the judicial and electoral organs of the state under immense strain.
“It is not just a fight within the MAS,” said Jose Luis Exeni, a political analyst at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung foundation in La Paz. “It’s contaminating everything.”
Bolivia’s top judges, including those on the Constitutional Court and Supreme Court, are elected on one day, every six years, in a process that is acutely vulnerable to political interference. The elections are a two-step process: First, a two-thirds supermajority in Congress selects a shortlist of candidates, then the people vote.
In both 2011 and 2017, the MAS controlled a congressional supermajority, allowing it to pick the judicial shortlist it wanted with little transparency, citizen oversight, political compromise or even proper evaluation. Though it filled the courts with its preferred candidates, the process lacked democratic legitimacy. Both times the opposition called for a protest vote, with 59 percent voting null or blank in 2011, and 66 percent doing so in 2017.
Now that Arce’s government can only count on a minority in Congress, it has apparently calculated that it stands to lose considerable influence were elections to be held. The opposition has accused it of blocking the process.
The terms of the current judges should have ended at the end of 2023, but those on the constitutional court ruled to extend their own mandates indefinitely. Since then, the court has put out a series of rulings favorable to the government, leading experts to believe there is an informal agreement between them. The most controversial was a resolution that the government insists disqualifies Morales from running in 2025, though experts disagree. The court has also stopped legislators from questioning ministers and mounting votes of no confidence, shielding the executive from Congress.
“Judging by the decisions taken by the court, there is a convergence or exchange of interests between it and the government,” said Fernando Mayorga, a sociologist at the Universidad Mayor de San Simon in Cochabamba.
Whatever happens, the standoff over judicial elections has once more underscored the internal divisions in Bolivia’s ruling MAS party.
The executive making informal demands of the Constitutional Court isn’t entirely new—Morales did it in 2017, when the court ruled it would be against his human rights to keep him from running for a third consecutive term. But it has become more frequent, and the judges seem less able or willing to resist. Now Arce’s weak government depends on the dynamic.
Eduardo Rodriguez Veltze, a former chief justice of the Supreme Court who also briefly served as Bolivia’s interim president 20 years ago, went further. “I believe the executive put together a plan with the judicial authorities to delay and indefinitely postpone the renewal of those authorities through elections,” he said. “Today,” he added, “these courts are explicitly an operative arm of the interests of a political fraction of the executive.”
That’s why Morales and his supporters are determined to make the judicial elections happen, anticipating that a new cohort of judges would shift the balance of political influence in the courts. In February, they mounted blockades of key roads for 15 days, demanding immediate judicial elections. As the economic costs from the blockades piled up, the government eventually conceded. Elections were planned for June—but the process soon became paralyzed again.
All of this culminated in a day of political drama on June 6. With Arce on a state visit to Russia, Vice President David Choquehuanca was filling in as president, making Senate leader Andronico Rodriguez the temporary president of Congress. Though Rodriguez has strived to be a conciliatory figure, he nonetheless remains closer to Morales than to Arce. He took advantage of his temporary position to hold a congressional session in which a bloc of MAS legislators voted with the two other national-level opposition parties to approve laws that would end the mandates of the sitting judges and rekindle the process for judicial elections.
The laws still need to be promulgated by Arce, but Choquehuanca filed a consultation with the constitutional court the next day, asking it to consider the legality of the June 6 session. Meanwhile, Morales held a meeting of his faction of the MAS on June 10, which issued a deadline of 10 days for Arce to promulgate the laws passed in that session—or face more mobilizations.
Bolivia is now waiting to see how the constitutional court will respond. If it rules the session was valid, Arce will have to promulgate the laws, ending the judges’ terms and jumpstarting the process to elect new ones. If it rules the session invalid, which experts expect, the situation returns to a stalemate, and Bolivia’s political and institutional crisis will continue to deepen.
Whatever happens, the episode once more underscored the MAS’ internal divisions. “There is evidently a group aligned with Morales and another aligned with Arce, but there is also a fringe of deputies and senators who act in a relatively autonomous way according to the parliamentary agenda,” said Mayorga. In this instance, he added, they tactically combined the laws about judicial elections with others approving a pardon that would reduce overcrowding in Bolivian prisons as well as a multilateral loan that Arce’s beleaguered government badly needs.
At the same time, though, it highlighted the rarity of such cohesion among the opposition. Whether this coalition comes together again will depend on the government’s response. “They’ve found something they agree on, but it’s by no means an alliance—it’s a circumstantial agreement,” said Maria Teresa Zegada, a sociologist also at the Universidad Mayor de San Simon in Cochabamba. “There’s a kind of institutional blockage in Congress, where the government can’t find a majority to approve its laws. If the other groups started acting together more strategically, it could really give them problems of governance.”
What distinguishes the current moment from February, when Morales and his supporters previously mobilized to force judicial elections, is Bolivia’s worsening economic situation. A slow-motion crisis has been evolving since early 2023, when persistent dollar shortages first began. Bolivia has a dollar peg, and the official dollar rate remains 6.96 bolivianos. But the parallel rate on the black market has reportedly passed 9 bolivianos. This has resulted in rising inflation and recurrent fuel shortages, prompting various groups, such as truck drivers, to march and threaten blockades.
Right now, these protests have expressed specific, sectoral demands, but if Morales can find a way to tap into the growing unrest and harness it to his cause, the popular pressure could be difficult for the government resist. “You could imagine this unrest adding to an anti-government mobilization generated by Evismo,” said Zegada, referring to Morales’ movement. “And that would be really explosive for the government.”
Thomas Graham is a freelance journalist currently based in Mexico, and previously based in Bolivia. He writes for The Guardian, The Economist and the Financial Times, among others.