He won that vote but was forced to resign amid deadly protests over alleged election fraud, and fled the country. He returned after his then ally Luis Arce won the presidency in October 2020.
Morales has since fallen out with Arce.
Saturday’s announcement from the court reversed a ruling it had made in 2017 which effectively found that being able to run for re-election is a “human right.”
The new ruling cannot be appealed.
Morales denounced the new ruling as evidence of what he called complicity against him among judges, the government and the right wing in Bolivia.
The court’s decision means that people in Bolivia can serve no more than two terms as president — either consecutively or not.
It’s interesting how populist leaders tend to fall into this bucket of succumbing to right-wing, even fascist, tendencies once they achieve power. One could almost read politics, globally, as a theatrical farce that serves as a pretence for capitalist control – except that globally politicians are responsible for a great deal of harm against citizens.
The cold reading of these kinds of power-grabbing leaders is often “they’re harmful, but that’s why more people should vote” from the exhaustingly right-wing US populace, without any acknowledgement of the deeper power that (structurally) conditions human agency.
But that’s a story for another day.