Bolivia - 2025 Election
Centrist senator Rodrigo Paz won Bolivia’s presidential election on 19 Octobber 2025, in a surprise victory that ended 20 years of dominance by the left-wing Movement Toward Socialism party. His win reflected growing anger over the country’s deepening economic crisis, fuel shortages and soaring inflation. Rodrigo Paz, a centrist senator who had never been a nationally prominent figure until now, galvanised voters outraged by the country’s economic crisis and frustrated after 20 years of rule by the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party.
“The trend is irreversible,” said Oscar Hassenteufel, the president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, which released early results showing that Paz, 58, secured more than 54 percent of the vote. His rival, former right-wing president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, took just over 45 percent. Paz and his popular running mate, former police captain Edman Lara, gained traction among working-class and rural voters disillusioned with the unrestrained spending of the long-ruling MAS party but wary of a radical turn away from its social protections.
Although Paz planned to end Bolivia’s fixed exchange rate, phase out generous fuel subsidies and cut back public investment, he pledged a gradual approach to free-market reforms in hopes of avoiding a sharp recession or a spike in inflation that could further anger the public. Quiroga, by contrast, advocated turning to the International Monetary Fund for a shock-therapy package of the kind Bolivians came to know and fear in the 1990s.
Paz’s victory set this nation of 12 million on a sharply uncertain path as he sought to enact major change for the first time since the 2005 election of Evo Morales, the founder of MAS and Bolivia’s first Indigenous president. Since 2023, the Andean nation had been crippled by a shortage of US dollars that has locked Bolivians out of their own savings and hampered imports. Year-on-year inflation soared to 23 percent in September 2025 — the highest rate since 1991 — while fuel shortages hadparalysed the country, with motorists often waiting days in line to fill their tanks.
Bolivians were struggling through the country's worst crisis in a generation, marked by acute shortages of dollars, fuel and subsidised bread. A dramatic drop in gas exports has eaten into the country's foreign currency reserves, making it unable to import sufficient fuel for its needs.
The 2025 elections were held amid the country’s worst economic crisis since the mid-1980s. They followed political turmoil in 2024, such as a coup attempt in June, and the split of the ruling MAS party into two factions, with one supporting the outgoing President, Luis Arce, and the other supporting the former President, Evo Morales. In May 2025, President Arce announced that he would not seek re-election in 2025. Shortly afterwards, the Constitutional Court ruled that Mr. Morales, who had already served three presidential terms, would not be eligible to seek a new term.
General Elections
During general elections in August 2025, Bolivians elected a supermajority of legislators from pro-market, pro-reform parties and sent two pro-U.S. candidates to runoff elections in October 2025. Whichever presidential candidate comes to office on November 8, 2025, he will have a mandate for investor-friendly reforms and a supermajority in the legislature to implement them.
These elections followed political, institutional, and socioeconomic crises that both highlighted divisions in the ruling party and resulted in an almost paralysed legislature, petrol shortages, rampant inflation, and a currency crisis. A low-key campaign period grounded in respect of fundamental freedoms was followed by a well-organised election day.
Fundamental freedoms were widely respected in the campaign, which was overall subdued and relied mainly on traditional methods such as door-to-door canvassing. Political debates were a distinctive feature of this electoral process, contributing positively to informing voters. Overall, candidates campaigned freely, except in a few specific areas.
The legal electoral framework offered sufficient guarantees for the conduct of democratic elections. Nonetheless, certain regulatory gaps and implementation challenges remain. There is a weak political and campaign finance system, a need for stronger enforcement mechanisms to address political violence against women, and significant inconsistencies in the candidate registration process. In fact, the final candidate lists were published only one day before election day.
Election preparations were adequate and on time, despite significant logistical challenges arising from the country’s severe economic crisis, although a cross-section of interlocutors questioned the Supreme Electoral Tribunal’s (TSE) effective autonomy, noting limited safeguards against political pressure and citing Constitutional Court interventions in matters within the TSE’s remit. The TSE also faced a protracted leadership crisis, internal divisions, and, at times, transparency shortcomings in its operations. Nevertheless, the TSE’s acting president has managed to preserve independence and neutrality, thus contributing to public confidence.
Various technologies were incorporated in this electoral process, most notably for transmission of the preliminary results (SIREPRE) and for tabulation of the official results (SCORC). Despite widespread doubts among stakeholders, the TSE successfully implemented the preliminary results system and delivered timely results early on election night, confirming the holding of a second round of presidential elections.
A pluralist, although polarised, media landscape provided access to a wide range of political opinions, although candidates’ capacity to afford paid electoral ads in the media was significantly uneven. Free airtime on public media, offered to all presidential candidates, rarely targeted peak hours on Bolivia TV, substantially limiting the audience. Equity was not consistently respected in terms of candidates’ coverage in news and other election programmes. Freedoms of expression and of the media were globally respected, except for some zones where journalists had limited access.
Social media was a key element of political communication, with an online political arena driven by TikTok-era campaigning, uneven ad spending favouring some candidates, and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence-powered disinformation. In addition, the ruling party's campaign used public officials and state media to amplify its messages. Electoral disinformation included fake polls, alleged failures of the SIREPRE, and claims of results tampering. TSE social media monitoring, while grossly understaffed and with an inadequate regulatory framework, still managed to identify a significant number of cases relating to hate speech, disinformation, and other violations of online campaigning rules.
Despite one of the highest proportions of women in parliament globally and a robust legal framework for women’s political participation, there are still enforcement challenges to combat political harassment and violence against women. The only woman running for the presidency withdrew her candidacy two weeks before the elections, citing among other things gender-based political violence.
Barriers to the political participation of indigenous minorities remained largely unaddressed. The Law on Political Organisations confines indigenous organisations’ direct participation to the subnational level, restricting what the Constitution permits for indigenous participation.
No party won an outright majority in either chamber at the 2025 elections. The Christian Democratic Party (PDC), which nominated Mr. Rodrigo Paz Pereira as its presidential candidate, became the largest force in both the 130-member Chamber of Deputies and the 36-member Chamber of Senators. The PDC won 49 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, 10 more than the LIBRE alliance, led by former President Jorge Tuto Quiroga. The Unity alliance, led by Mr. Samuel Doria Medina, came third. The ruling Movement for Socialism (MAS-IPSP), which had governed the country for two decades, won only two seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
Presidential Elections
At the presidential elections held in parallel with the parliamentary polls, no candidate obtained the required number of votes to be elected in the first round. To avoid a runoff, presidential candidates need to win more than 50% of the vote, or have over 40% support with a 10-percentage point lead.
Two right-wing candidates led the race for the first time since 2005 as voters deserted the deeply divided Movement Towards Socialism party, increasingly blamed for the country's deep economic crisis, ahead of the vote. The two right-wing candidates promised to impose austerity measures after two decades of socialist policies, with voters set to go to the polls on 19 October 2025. Polls showed center-right business tycoon Samuel Doria Medina and right-wing ex-president Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga running neck-and-neck on around 20 percent each, with six other candidates trailing far behind.
Quiroga came second in the first round of Bolivia's August 17 presidential election with 26.7 percent, behind centre-right senator Rodrigo Paz on 32 percent. Doria Medina and Quiroga both vowed to cut costly fuel subsidies, partly roll back Morales-era nationalisations and close loss-making public companies.
Ex-president Evo Morales, who has been barred from running in the race, called on voters to spoil their ballots to discredit the results. Both right-wing candidates have vowed to arrest the highly polarising Morales, who attempted to run for a fourth term despite being wanted by police in connection with his alleged sexual relationship with a teenage girl while in office. Morales has dismissed the allegations against him as a political plot designed to stop him returning to office.
The two main left-wing candidates, Senate president Andronico Rodriguez and his Movement Towards Socialism rival, former interior minister Eduardo del Castillo, are polling in the single digits. Morales, 65, had called on his supporters to avenge his disqualification by spoiling their ballots.
As anger flared in June 2025 over Morales' disqualification, his supporters blocked highways and clashed with police in unrest that left eight people dead. Morales warned that the country would “convulse” should Sunday's election proceed. Yet in recent weeks he has changed his tune, urging his followers to register their frustration through the ballot box.
After nearly two decades of one-party rule under the Movement Toward Socialism party, or MAS, three years of an accelerating currency crisis and too many months of mind-numbing fuel lines, Bolivia was lurching to the right. Now, the question was how much change do Bolivians want — and how fast. For the first time since Bolivia’s Movement Toward Socialism party, or MAS, rocketed to power in 2005 under the maverick former union leader Evo Morales, the presidential runoff pitted two conservative, business-friendly candidates against each other. MAS received so few votes in the August 17 elections that it almost lost its legal status as Bolivians expressed a prevailing desire for change.
The next president’s immediate task must be to draw dollars into Bolivia and import enough fuel to ease the shortage. Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, a right-wing former president who has run and lost three times before, envisions a bailout from the International Monetary Fund and a shock fiscal adjustment. Ahead of the vote, Quiroga was again leading opinion polls. The underdog status helped endear the privileged son of former President Jaime Paz Zamora (1989-1993) to the public. Everyone is against him, the mainstream media, the pollsters, they want him to lose.
Paz would cut $1.2 billion in annual fuel subsidies – a major drain on the public purse – and save another $1.3 billion in unspecified "superfluous spending." Paz added that he would create tax incentives to get Bolivians to bank any dollars hidden under their mattress but would not initially seek an international bailout, as proposed by Quiroga. "People understand that we have to get our house in order first," said Paz.
Quiroga said his first priority would be to tamp down inflation, which rose to 24.8 percent year-on-year in July, its highest level since at least 2008. The 65-year-old also threatened to close the central bank, accusing the outgoing government of using it as a "credit card," and promised to flood Bolivia's lithium-rich Andean high plains with tax-free zones to attract investment.
Quiroga vowed to scrap billion-dollar lithium extraction deals struck by the outgoing government with Russia and China if elected leader. "We don't recognise (outgoing President Luis) Arce's contracts... Let's stop them, they won't be approved," the US-educated Quiroga, who has vowed a major shake-up in Bolivia's alliances if elected president in October, told AFP in an interview.
If elected, Quiroga — who graduated from Texas A&M University and worked for IBM in Austin, Texas — would trigger a major geopolitical realignment in a country that for the past two decades has shunned the U.S. and cozied up to China and Russia. In September 2026, Quiroga flew to Washington for what he said were meetings with “people who can get us out of this rut,” promising progress in talks on a $12 billion bailout from the IMF, Inter-American Development Bank and World Bank that would restore public confidence in the boliviano and allow Bolivia to immediately source more fuel. At rallies, he pitches the potential windfalls from foreign investment in Bolivian gas exploration and lithium production, a contentious issue due to Indigenous communities’ opposition to water-intensive extraction on their lands.
Some Bolivians, wary of American meddling in their affairs since the bloody US-led war on drugs, balk at these gestures. Others feel reassured by Quiroga's commitment to 180-degree change and speak of Paz and Lara as the latest incarnation of ruinous left-wing populism.
His rival Rodrigo Paz, a centrist senator, says he’ll scrounge up the cash by legalizing the black market, phasing out wasteful subsidies and luring Bolivians' hoarded dollars back into the banking system. Paz, 58, is struggling to strike the balance between appeasing Bolivians' desperation for change and courting working-class voters, many of whom are disillusioned MAS supporters who see Quiroga's austerity as a recipe for recession.
Paz's running mate, Edman Lara, has emerged as the real star of the campaign, helping the senator pull off a shock victory in the first round of elections. He captured first place after weeks of polling far behind Quiroga. Captain Lara, as the vice presidential candidate is known, became something of a folk hero a few years ago after being fired from the police for denouncing corruption in viral TikTok videos. The ex-officer has no political experience and an awkward habit of making populist promises — like universal income for women — in rousing speeches that contradict Paz's goal of restoring fiscal order. Although Paz has walked back some of Lara's more expensive proposals like fivefold increases to pensions, they both insist on balancing tough, free-market reforms with MAS-style social protections.
With the official exchange rate between the boliviano and the dollar all but collapsed, it has become dirt cheap for Peruvians to shop in Bolivia and lucrative for Bolivians to sell in Peru. One Peruvian sol is worth nearly four bolivianos on the black market. Because of strict price controls and dollar scarcity, Bolivia can't scrape together enough cash for imports. Food shortages have become a part of life. Queues snake outside subsidized bakeries. Empty shelves send shoppers on scavenger hunts for oil and rice. Authorities blame smugglers for the scarcity and sky-high prices of staples — even as the black market is more a consequence of the shortages than the cause.
Rather than focusing on foreign investors as the key to development, Paz hopes to uncover hidden cash by cracking down on corruption and formalizing the black market. He proposes legalizing smuggled vehicles, offering tax amnesties to Bolivians who declare their stashed dollars and allowing the cross-border smugglers to register as vendors. “There will be no more smuggling, everything will be legal,” he declared at his closing campaign rally.
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