Bolivia’s top electoral tribunal has disqualified former President Evo Morales and suspended the candidacy of Senate President Andrónico Rodríguez ahead of the August presidential election.
This decision immediately strengthens President Luis Arce’s governing socialist party’s position despite its current unpopularity.
Morales, the country’s first Indigenous president, governed from 2006 until his removal in 2019, while Rodríguez is a key leftist figure from Morales’ coca-growing rural base.
Both challengers have condemned the rulings and pledged to contest them.
The tribunal’s actions remove the strongest leftist competitors to Arce’s nominee, reshaping the upcoming political landscape in Bolivia.
“The parties that want to support me have been persecuted,” Morales, who still commands fervent support in his tropical highland stronghold, told a local radio show. “The battle is not lost. We will wage a social and legal battle.”
On social media, he voiced alarm over “the grave threat facing democracy today.”
Morales has repeatedly promised that Bolivia would “convulse” if the electoral tribunal bars him from the race, heightening a sense of crisis in the run-up to the deeply polarized vote scheduled for Aug. 17.
President Arce dismissed their criticism, asking only that “the electoral dispute not generate political and economic instability.”