LA PAZ, Bolivia, May 21, (AP): Bolivia’s top electoral tribunal on Tuesday disqualified former President Evo Morales from running in the August presidential vote and suspended the candidacy of the other main leftist contender, immediately vaulting President Luis Arce’s governing socialist party into the ranks of front-runners despite its unpopularity.

The moves targeted the two strongest leftist challengers to Arce's nominee: Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president who governed the country from 2006 until his ouster in 2019, and Andrónico Rodríguez, the young Senate president who hails from Morales' rural coca-growing bastion. Both Morales and Rodríguez vowed to fight the decisions and condemned them as a blow to the Andean nation’s fragile democracy.

"The parties that want to support me have been persecuted,” Morales, who still commands fervent support in his tropical highland stronghold, told a local radio show. "The battle is not lost. We will wage a social and legal battle.” On social media, he voiced alarm over "the grave threat facing democracy today.” Morales has repeatedly promised that Bolivia would "convulse” if the electoral tribunal bars him from the race, heightening a sense of crisis in the run-up to the deeply polarized vote scheduled for Aug 17.

President Arce dismissed their criticism, asking only that "the electoral dispute not generate political and economic instability." Rodríguez - a fresh-faced 36-year-old candidate who generated excitement among voters disillusioned with Morales’ fifth presidential bid and outraged with Arce’s handling of Bolivia's worst economic crisis in 40 years - also called for protests against what he called "a political decision” to suspend his candidacy. "No ruling or judicial decision driven by political interests can overrule the sovereign will of the people,” he wrote on X. The Supreme Electoral Tribunal gave narrow, technical reasons for the decisions as the window closed for candidates to register their political parties.