The Americas | Term limits in Bolivia

The man who would be king

Evo Morales backtracks on a promise not to seek power after 2019

NEARLY a decade has passed since Evo Morales took office as Bolivia’s first indigenous president. During his re-election campaign in 2014, he promised not to seek another term after this one. But the thin Andean air may be distorting lawmakers’ memories. During an all-night session on September 26th, Mr Morales’s legislative super-majority passed a reform that would allow him to run for another five-year term, which would expire in 2025.

If implemented, the change will reinforce a strong trend towards looser term limits, both within Bolivia and in Latin America overall (see table). Under the country’s constitution of 2009, Mr Morales should by rights have been ineligible to run last year. However, the government argued that his first term should not count since it occurred before the new constitution was adopted. Bolivia’s pliant Constitutional Court, which the opposition accuses of being lackeys of the president, duly accepted this logic.

On its own, the new law does not pave the way for the president to spend two decades in office. The proposal will now go to a referendum, currently pencilled in for February. Álvaro García Linera, the vice-president, is leading the government’s campaign. His first salvo has been to question the commitment to democracy of the “no” side, arguing that they are denying voters the right to back Bolivia’s most popular politician. His rivals counter that term limits are necessary only to dethrone leaders who would otherwise be re-elected indefinitely. “Latin America has learnt to its cost what happens when presidents are allowed to perpetuate themselves in power,” says Óscar Ortiz, an opposition senator. The president’s supporters also argue that many rich countries have no term limits—though most are parliamentary democracies that do not have presidents.

The opposition has an uphill climb. In a majority-indigenous nation, Mr Morales’s unapologetically ethnic politics has given him an unbreakable majority. To make inroads with the president’s base, the “no” side is likely to turn to Rafael Quispe, an indigenous Aymara lawmaker, who recently mocked the president’s imperial aspirations by taking his seat in the National Assembly wearing a cardboard “Inca” crown. He is campaigning on the slogan “I also want to be king.” “This is far from a government of the indigenous,” Mr Quispe says. “The Aymara have a rule, taqi muyu. It means alternating leadership. In our communities a leader is elected for two years, three at most. They cannot come back again even if they beg us.”

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "The man who would be king"

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