In Plaza Murillo, the heart of Bolivia’s political capital, La Paz – and home to the presidential palace, parliament and the country’s main Catholic cathedral – time may be running out for a clock that runs backwards.
Installed atop of the congressional palace during the years of prosperity under former president Evo Morales, 65, the clock was conceived as a symbol of the “decolonial and anti-imperialist” worldview championed by the left.
But it has since become an emblem of the decline of Morales’s Movimiento al Socialismo (Mas) party – with some saying that, as the country faces its worst economic crisis in 40 years, Bolivia itself has been moving backwards.
And when 7.9 million Bolivians head to the polls this Sunday to choose their next president, Mas not only risks losing power after nearly 20 years – but it could disappear as a political force altogether.
Polls point to a potential runoff between two rightwing candidates: the centre-right business tycoon and former planning minister Samuel Doria Medina, 66, followed closely by Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, 65, a rightwing former president who briefly led the country in 2001 after the resignation of the former dictator Hugo Banzer.
The deeply unpopular current president, Luis Arce – a former finance minister under Morales who wrested control of Mas from his former mentor – opted not to seek re-election and instead nominated his 36-year-old minister of government, Eduardo del Castillo.
Unlike previous elections in which Morales and then Arce secured outright first-round victories with over 50% of the vote, Del Castillo is now polling below 3%, the minimum threshold for a party to remain eligible to contest future elections.
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“Arce will go down in history as the one who buried the ‘father’, seized the party and, in all likelihood, led it to its end,” said the political and economic analyst Gonzalo Chávez Alvarez, a professor at the Universidad Católica Boliviana.
Although polling in Bolivia has historically proved unreliable, the prospect of a party that was once hegemonic now teetering on the brink of oblivion is anything but trivial.
“I can bet we won’t lose our legal status,” Arce told the Guardian late on Thursday, arguing that polls failed to predict his first-round victory in 2020.
Even so, the president showed little confidence in any surprise from the left and said he would respect the result if the right won. “If they are democratically elected, why not accept it?” he said. “And we will mobilise to resist, to be the opposition, of course.”
“I had high hopes for this government but now I only feel disappointment,” said Pablo Quispe, 55, who has sold hats for the past 25 years in a street market in El Alto – a booming high-altitude city near La Paz that was once a Mas stronghold.
After years of prosperity driven by a natural gas boom, reserves dwindled during the final years of Morales’s presidency, triggering an economic crisis that has deepened ever since.
“The gas that should have sustained the country for much longer – and then generated resources to be invested in other sectors, diversifying the economy – wasn’t used that way,” said Alvarez.
Under Arce, the economy has deteriorated further: by July 2025, annual inflation had reached 24.8%, the highest level since at least 2008. Just as Bolivia celebrates 200 years of independence, there are shortages of fuel and US dollars, leading to scarcities and long queues even for bread.
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“Everything is more expensive, and we’re barely getting by,” said Quispe, who previously voted for Masbut now plans to vote for Medina because “the left just isn’t working any more”.
Leticia Guarachi Padilla, a 35-year-old leftist entrepreneur who runs a small business installing blinds and curtains, plans to spoil her ballot in protest over Morales’s exclusion from the race.
The first Indigenous president in Bolivia’s history and the country’s longest-serving leader, from 2006 to 2019, Morales was barred by the constitutional court, which ruled that he has already exceeded the two-term limit, and the electoral court, which has argued that his party is not formally registered.
Since October, he has remained entrenched in central Bolivia, where hundreds of coca farmers have prevented police from executing an arrest warrant issued against him over allegations that he fathered a child with a 15-year-old while in office.
In recent weeks, Morales has urged supporters to cast blank votes – claiming that if the number of spoiled ballots exceeds the share won by the top candidate, it would mean he had won.
The highest-polling leftwing name is that of Andrónico Rodríguez, a 36-year-old senator, polling third to fifth.
Once seen as Morales’s natural heir due to his Indigenous roots and leadership in the coca growers’ union, Rodríguez was labelled a traitor by his former mentor after deciding to launch his own candidacy and has seemed unable to rally support from the fragmented left.
“I voted for Evo every time he ran, and I don’t regret it because he promoted structural changes that favoured the poorest,” said Padilla, who acknowledged the former president’s “problems”, including “his relationships with underage girls and the fact that he sees himself as a saviour, driven more by ego”. But she still believes he should have run.
“Voting for Doria or Quiroga means voting for imperialism and for the US to retake control of Bolivia,” she said.
If no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, or at least 40% with a 10-point lead over the runner-up, a second round will be held on 19 October, which would be unprecedented in the country’s history.
Doria and Quiroga are running for the fourth time, but still present themselves as political outsiders. Both advocate spending cuts as their main strategy to tackle the economic crisis.
Quiroga says he would prioritise relations with the United States, while Medina has promised to restore the supply of dollars and fuel within 100 days.
His campaign slogan is “100 días, carajo” (100 days, dammit), a reference not to the Argentine president Javier Milei’s libertarian rallying cry “Viva la libertad, carajo!” (Long live freedom, dammit!), but to the 2005 plane crash Medina survived, after which he said: “Carajo, no me puedo morir” (I can’t die, dammit!).
Riding a motorbike decorated with campaign flags, automotive engineer Juan Pablo Rodríguez, 28, attended Medina’s final rally in La Paz on Tuesday with his wife, Michelle López, also 28, and their one-year-old daughter. “Samuel can fix the crisis because he’s a great businessman,” he said.
One of Bolivia’s wealthiest men, with a fortune in cement, hospitality and fast food, Medina told the Guardian that if elected, he plans to restore the Plaza Murillo clock to its original, clockwise direction: “Rationality will return, at last.” The current clock, he said, symbolised a country “moving backwards”.
The clock – with the number 12 still at the top, but with hands turning to the left to count the hours – was installed in 2014 on the initiative of David Choquehuanca, then foreign minister under Morales and now vice-president under Arce.
He claimed it was a way to affirm Bolivia’s identity as a “southern nation”, arguing that a southern hemisphere sundial shadow moves left.
But physicist Francesco Zaratti, an emeritus professor at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, has long argued the clock “makes no scientific sense”, noting that in Bolivia the shadow can sometimes move right.
“When we have a new president, I bet it’ll be one of the first things to go, as a symbolic end to Mas’s 20-year cycle in power,” said Zaratti.
Grover Quispe Lima, 35, looks at the clock every day as he sells maize to feed the hundreds of pigeons in Plaza Murillo. He has been walloped by the crisis, with maize prices rising from 120 (£13) to 200 (£21) bolivianos in a year.
“To me, it’s irrelevant whether the clock moves backwards or forwards – the only thing that matters is that the next president improves our country,” he said.
