Bolivia's politics: a plurinational constitution and the fight over its term limit

What the plurinational constitution declares

The constitution approved by referendum on 25 January 2009 opens by redefining the state. Article 1 constitutes Bolivia as a "Unitary Social State of Pluri-National Communitarian Law", free, independent, sovereign, democratic, intercultural, decentralised and with autonomies, and founded on political, economic, juridical, cultural and linguistic pluralism. Article 2 grounds the rights of Indigenous peoples in their existence before colonisation, and guarantees their self-determination, which it defines as autonomy, self-government and control of their own institutions, inside the unity of the state. The official name changed with it, to the Plurinational State of Bolivia.

Several articles turn that principle into rules. Article 5 makes official Spanish and all the languages of the Indigenous nations and peoples, and names them: Aymara, Guaraní and Quechua among them, and thirty-three more, from Araona to Zamuco. The national government and every departmental government must work in at least two, one of them Spanish. Article 4 separates the state from religion. Article 6 lists the symbols of the state, and places the wiphala beside the red, yellow and green tricolour, with the kantuta and patujú flowers.

The text is long and specific in ways most constitutions are not. Article 384 protects native coca as cultural patrimony and declares that coca in its natural state is not a narcotic. Article 398 prohibits the latifundio, the unproductive large estate, and caps any landholding at 5,000 hectares. Article 10 declares the state pacifist and prohibits foreign military bases on Bolivian soil. Article 267 declares an inalienable right to the territory that gives access to the Pacific.

Article 8 writes Indigenous ethics into the state's principles, in their own languages: ama qhilla, ama llulla, ama suwa, do not be lazy, do not lie, do not steal, beside suma qamaña, living well, and the Guaraní ñandereko and teko kavi. Article 30 defines an Indigenous nation or people as any collective sharing identity, language, history, institutions, territory and world view whose existence predates the Spanish invasion, and lets a citizen have that identity recorded on an identity card or passport. Article 349 makes natural resources the property of the Bolivian people, administered by the state, and Article 359 extends the same to hydrocarbons: the state owns all production and is the only party allowed to sell it, and a contract that breaches the article is void and its signatories guilty of treason.

The INE's summary of the political order describes the system the same way: a democracy that the constitution calls participatory, representative and communitarian, with equal conditions for men and women. After the 2014 election, Wikipedia records, 53.1% of the seats in the national legislature were held by women.

Why the old constitutions were rarely observed

The Worldmark encyclopedia calls Bolivia's constitutional history before 2009 spotty, and its account of the charter in force from 1967 is mostly a record of suspension. The military junta of November 1964 replaced the constitution of 1961 with that of 1945, keeping only the 1961 clauses on universal suffrage, the nationalisation of the tin mines, land reform and compulsory schooling. The armed forces dissolved Congress from 1969 to 1979 and again from 1980 to 1982, no presidential election was held between 1966 and 1978, and a president could declare a state of siege and rule by decree for 90 days. An amendment of 1994 strengthened the presidency and recognised Indigenous peoples, and it was this constitution, with that amendment, that the constituent assembly elected in 2006 set out to replace.

Article 411 of the 2009 text makes its own replacement harder. A total reform, or any change to rights or to the rules of reform, needs a constituent assembly called by referendum, which citizens can initiate with the signatures of 20% of the electorate. A partial reform needs two-thirds of the Assembly or the same 20% of voters, and a referendum to confirm it.

How the president is elected

Article 166 sets the threshold. A presidential ticket wins in the first round with more than 50% of the valid votes, or with at least 40% and a lead of ten points over the second ticket. Otherwise the top two meet in a run-off within sixty days. Article 168 gives the president and vice-president five-year terms and allows one consecutive re-election. A candidate must be thirty years old and resident in the country for the five years before the vote. Voting is compulsory under Article 26.

The rule is new. The constitution of 1967, as the Worldmark encyclopedia describes it before its replacement, gave a four-year term with no immediate re-election, and when no candidate won a majority Congress chose the president from the leading candidates. That provision decided several presidencies: Hugo Banzer was chosen by Congress in August 1997 after winning 22% of the vote, and Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada by 84 votes to 43 in August 2002, according to Wikipedia's account of the executive branch.

Article 240 adds the recall. Any elected official outside the judiciary can be removed by a referendum requested by at least 15% of the voters of the district that elected them, once half the term has passed and before its last year. A recall vote on the presidency was held in August 2008, and Britannica records that two-thirds of voters supported its continuation.

How the legislature is made up

The Plurinational Legislative Assembly has two chambers, both elected for five years with the president. The Chamber of Deputies has 130 members under Article 146. Half are elected in single-member districts by simple majority and half from party lists by proportional representation; Wikipedia's breakdown gives 70 district seats, 63 list seats and 7 seats elected in special districts by Indigenous peoples. The seats are shared among the departments by population at the latest census, with a minimum for the least populous. The Chamber of Senators has 36 members under Article 148, four from each of the nine departments, which gives Pando the same weight in the Senate as La Paz.

The INE's summary states that the Assembly is the only body that may pass laws for the whole territory. Candidates must be 18 and resident in their district for two years.

Why Bolivia elects its judges

The constitution puts the courts to a popular vote. Article 182 has the Supreme Court of Justice elected by universal suffrage from candidates pre-selected by a two-thirds vote of the Assembly, and forbids campaigning by or for any candidate: the Electoral Organ alone publicises their merits. The first judicial elections were held in October 2011, Wikipedia records, choosing the members of the Supreme Court of Justice, the Plurinational Constitutional Court, the Agro-environmental Court and the Judiciary Council.

Article 179 sets out three jurisdictions. The ordinary courts, the agro-environmental courts and the jurisdiction of the Indigenous peoples, exercised by their own authorities, and the ordinary and Indigenous jurisdictions are given equal standing. Constitutional questions go to the Plurinational Constitutional Court. The court system has its seat in Sucre, which Article 6 names as the capital; the executive and the legislature sit in La Paz.

A fourth branch, the Plurinational Electoral Organ, replaced the National Electoral Court in 2010 and runs every vote, from the presidency to the courts.

How power is divided across the territory

The INE lists the territorial units as departments, provinces, municipalities and Indigenous territories. The nine departments are Chuquisaca, La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí, Tarija, Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando. For most of the republic's history they were run by prefects the president appointed. A decentralisation law of 1995 began to change that, and on 18 December 2005 the prefects were elected for the first time. A Popular Participation Law of April 1994 had already sent a share of national revenue to the municipalities.

The question of how much power the regions should hold divided the country in 2008. Four eastern departments approved autonomy statutes by referendum in May of that year, and the national government declared the votes illegal. The constitution that followed recognises departmental, regional, municipal and Indigenous autonomies. Article 289 defines Indigenous autonomy as self-government by a people sharing territory, culture, history and language, formed on its ancestral land through consultation of its population.

How the term limit led to crisis

Most of the political conflict since 2009 has turned on Article 168. In April 2013 the constitutional court ruled that Evo Morales could run for a third term, because his first had begun before the new charter. In a referendum in February 2016 voters rejected an amendment that would have allowed a fourth, by about 51% to 49% according to Britannica. In November 2017 the constitutional court removed term limits on the ground that standing for office is a human right, and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal upheld that decision in December 2018.

The election of 20 October 2019 that followed was disputed, and Morales resigned on 10 November after the Organization of American States reported irregularities and the commander of the armed forces asked him to go. His supporters call the events a coup; his opponents point to the irregularities the OAS reported, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research disputed the OAS's statistics. Both readings are recorded in the history of Bolivia. An interim government held office until elections in October 2020, and in November 2024 the constitutional court barred Morales from the presidential election of 2025.

The parties that governed between 1982 and 2005, the MNR, the MIR and Banzer's Nationalist Democratic Action are recorded by Wikipedia as the dominant ones over that period. The Movement for Socialism, founded out of the coca growers' movement, won a majority in the December 2005 election, the first by a single party, and held the presidency until the run-off of October 2025, which a candidate from outside it won.

What Bolivia asks of its neighbours and the world

The sea is written into the constitution. Article 267 calls the maritime claim a "permanent and inalienable objective" to be pursued by peaceful means, and Article 268 assigns the protection of maritime interests, rivers and lakes to a navy. Bolivia took the claim to the International Court of Justice, which in 2018 rejected its argument that Chile was obliged to negotiate. Relations with Chile were broken off on 17 March 1978, as Wikipedia's account of the War of the Pacific records. The Chaco boundary with Paraguay was settled in April 2009.

Bolivia was a founding member of the United Nations, joining on 14 November 1945 by the Worldmark encyclopedia's date, and joined the World Trade Organization on 12 September 1995. It belongs to the Organization of American States and the Andean Community, and the record lists its membership of Mercosur and of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America. Coca policy has shaped its relations with the United States: Britannica records that in the 1990s the government suppressed coca growing with American assistance, and that Morales campaigned in 2002 for the expulsion of the US Drug Enforcement Administration.