The election of Rodrigo Paz Pereira as Bolivia’s new president signals the end of the MAS era. But it is more than an end to Evo Morales’s leftist party. It showcases how Indigenous political power has transformed the country’s political landscape.
By Ximena Velasco-Guachalla and Callan Hummel
October 2025
On 19 October 2025, Bolivians chose Senator Rodrigo Paz Pereira in a presidential runoff against onetime interim president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga. The son of former president Jaime Paz Zamora (1989–93), Paz represents a generational shift within Bolivia’s political establishment. His 54.5 to 45 percent victory against Tuto makes him the new face of leadership in a politically fractured country gripped by a severe economic crisis. In 2025, for the first time in twenty years, Evo Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) were absent from the ballot. Paz’s rise signals both a break and a continuation — an end to the MAS era, but also a recognition that any new government must work within the context of the Indigenous political empowerment and social transformation that the MAS and Morales as president ushered in with his landslide triumph of 2005.
Indigenous political participation has transformed Bolivia’s institutions and redefined its political landscape. Founded in the late 1990s, the MAS has been the political vehicle for left-wing social movements representing Bolivia’s Indigenous majority. With Morales in the presidency and a new 2009 Constitution that institutionalized Indigenous inclusion, the MAS enacted social policies that lifted hundreds of thousands out of poverty and increased human-development indicators. Two decades of activism and governance trained a generation of Indigenous bureaucrats, fostered hundreds of new organizations, and cultivated an Indigenous business class in the cities that has fueled wealth accumulation. These developments have laid down a strong foundation of Indigenous political participation that will outlast MAS administrations as a multifaceted and independent set of organizations, leaders, and voters.
Why Voters Abandoned the MAS
The 2025 campaign unfolded amid the worst economic crisis in a generation. Bolivia faces a severe macroeconomic downturn marked by a shrinking economy, surging unemployment, and annual inflation topping 20 percent. Chronic fiscal imbalances, foreign-currency shortages, and disruptions in energy supplies intensify the strain. Long lines for diesel fuel and gasoline have become part of everyday life, while the prices of both domestic and imported goods have soared. On October 15, the national statistics office reported that the economy shrank 2.4 percent during the first half of 2025 — the worst such contraction since the 1980s. The World Bank projects that Bolivia’s recession will persist until at least 2027.
The new president faces the staggering challenge of steering the country out of a financial crisis that has been more than a decade in the making. Natural-gas output and revenues began dropping in 2014, but successive MAS administrations pushed off hard fiscal choices until foreign reserves ran out in 2024. Voters widely attribute the economic crisis to MAS leadership and policy choices: The gas production on which Bolivia depends was waning, but MAS governments subsidized fuel costs, kept the boliviano pegged to the U.S. dollar since 2011, and ran large fiscal deficits.
How Years of Infighting Weakened the MAS
Morales’s failed reelection bid earlier this year faced resistance from Indigenous organizations that once formed his political base. The MAS’s historic Unity Pact, forged in 2005, united powerful Indigenous social movements behind Morales. Yet over time, the party sought to co-opt these groups. The result was fragmentation: Social movements split between pro-government factions and independent ones, fueling widespread disillusionment and defections. In the long run, this dynamic encouraged rival Indigenous organizations that rejected MAS control. The Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia now has competing branches — some loyal to the government, others not. Meanwhile, leaders have founded entirely new organizations, such as the National Coordinator for the Defense of Indigenous and Peasant Territories of Bolivia, which openly opposes the outgoing MAS administration.
The sights and sounds of MAS infighting dominated the early stages of the 2025 presidential campaign. Morales urged voters to cast null ballots. Incumbent president Luis Arce retained dubious legal control of the MAS brand. Senate president Andrónico Rodriguez also faced legal obstacles but was ultimately cleared to run, albeit not on the MAS party line.
The 17 August 2025 first round election was a MAS debacle. The party that had won outright presidential majorities in 2005, 2009, 2014, and 2020 could now barely top 3 percent. This left Paz (who finished the first round with 32 percent) and Tuto (26.7 percent) vying to see who could attract the most ex-MAS voters in the runoff. Paz’s center-right positioning and charismatic anti-corruption running mate Edman Lara ultimately convinced more former MAS voters than Tuto’s conservative business elite credentials. How these voters understood and experienced the economic crisis weighed heavily in determining which way their votes went, as did the impressions they formed during a highly negative election campaign.
The Indigenous Business Class: An Enduring Power
The new administration — and future ones — will need to seek the approval of the urban Indigenous business class that has emerged in recent decades. In just a few years, from 2004 to 2012, this group’s bank deposits quadrupled and its loan portfolio tripled. Investors who are Aymara (Morales’s ethnic group) have forged particularly profitable economic ties with other countries, especially China. This new economic elite of qamiris (a term that means wealthy or rich in Aymara and is specifically used to refer to this emerging social and economic class) possesses economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital, but no fixed political allegiance. Indigenous businesses boomed under past MAS governments, but like many voters and groups, the qamiris care about recent economic performance and results.
El Alto, the largely Indigenous city of more than a million people that surrounds the administrative capital of La Paz, illustrates these trends. El Alto is a former MAS stronghold whose votes lofted Morales to national prominence and the presidency in the early 2000s. But as MAS mayors began piling up corruption scandals and failed development projects, El Alto’s voters started to look for new candidates and parties to support. Eva Copa began as an El Alto student leader and rose through MAS party ranks to become Senate president until an internal dispute pushed her out. In 2021, she ran for mayor and defeated the MAS candidate for El Alto’s mayorship.
In 2025’s first round, El Alto voters upset by the economic crisis backed Paz over MAS-affiliated candidates. They repeated this in the runoff and helped to propel him to the presidency. Maintaining this support will be a challenge because El Alto’s voters largely oppose austerity measures that Paz will likely have to impose, despite his campaign promises to the contrary. Moreover, Paz has been overshadowed in El Alto — as in other parts of the country — by his running mate on the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) ticket, Edman Lara. A forty-year-old former police captain with a major TikTok presence, Lara is a self-described political outsider and campaigner against police corruption. It has been a running joke in Bolivia that most PDC voters warmly back Lara but are not sure who Paz is.
The trajectories of young, Indigenous politicians such as Eva Copa and Andrónico Rodríguez (her successor as Senate president) away from the MAS and toward their own regional bases of support point suggest the decentralized future of Indigenous political power: Both began in the MAS but left when they found their respective political ascents cut short. Each now has a support base outside the party. After a falling out with Morales, Rodríguez ran in round one on the line of an MAS spinoff party and received 8 percent — more than twice what MAS standard-bearer Eduardo del Castillo managed to garner. Along with Copa and Rodríguez, many other MAS “renovators” have decided that the party will never heed their calls for leadership renewal and more regional democracy in choosing candidates. Political careers beyond the MAS beckon, and the incoming administration will need to work with this rising group.
What to Expect Now
Bolivia’s crisis has been more than a decade in the making, and there are no easy ways out of it. Campaign vows and voters’ preferences notwithstanding, the incoming administration will probably have to take unpopular austerity measures that shrink the state and public spending. These measures are likely to disproportionately impact Indigenous communities and organizations that have benefited from increased government spending. If the government implements austerity measures, many sectors will almost definitely respond with the kinds of large-scale protests that have brought down governments in the past.
Governance, both within institutions and on the streets, will be a crucial challenge for the upcoming administration. The new Congress is plural and fragmented, with no solid majorities to guarantee governability or pass unpopular economic reforms. The MAS has lost most of its seats in Congress but retains an ability to mobilize significant numbers of people in many parts of the country. That party along with other organizations can be expected to take to the streets.
With MAS having divided itself into electoral irrelevance, Indigenous organizations must find ways to aggregate diverse demands as the party once did. The new administration will need to build alliances with these organizations — whose numbers are large and mobilization capacities formidable — in order to govern. The Paz administration will likely seek civil society allies while deploying a policy of “divide and rule” in order to contain dissent by playing organizations and their leaders against one another. Can Bolivia’s formidable civil society organizations rebuild a united front in the “post-MAS” era?
Ximena Velasco-Guachalla is lecturer (assistant professor) in the Department of Government at the University of Essex. Callan Hummel is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of British Columbia.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: AIZAR RALDES/AFP via Getty Images
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