The two leading presidential candidates are both rightwingers and the leftist party of former president Evo Morales faces potential extinction
I
n 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.
