The writing’s on the wall for Evo…

So in case you didn’t know, the president of Bolivia is currently Evo Morales. He has been president since 2006. The original constitution of Bolivia didn’t allow presidents to be in office for two consecutive terms (two terms maximum allowed, but not consecutively) – but in 2009, Bolivians voted to change the constitution so that a president could serve 2 consecutive terms (but still a maximum of two terms).

Therefore Evo was allowed to run again in 2009, and he was elected president for a second consecutive term (with 64% of the vote – he is very popular)

The new constitution created in 2009 stated that presidential terms served before 2009 were not counted in the total number of terms served (for the purposes of there being a maximum of two terms)…. therefore Evo was able to run again in 2014 (as his term from 2006 – 2009 didn’t count under the new constitution), and once more he was elected president (this time with 62% of the vote – STILL very popular…)

So… this would mean that when Evo’s third term expired in 2019 he would not be able to run again…. BUT, this could be fixed – so in 2016 there was another referendum, with a proposal to allow another presidential term to be served. This one didn’t go Evo’s way and it was narrowly defeated with 51% of the vote against it.

So, it looked like Bolivia would have to find another president in 2019… BUT in 2017 the Supreme Tribunal of Justice of Bolivia made a declaration that term limits for ALL public office positions were to be scrapped… the reasons being… I’m not entirely sure…?! BUT ANYWAY, this means that Evo can keep running forever and be president until he dies (as long as everybody keeps voting for him…)

Whether this is a good or bad thing of course depends on your point of view! 🙂 And in fact all this background information is in this post, just so I can post some pictures of political graffiti – yes – because I like taking pictures of graffiti 🙂

So, we have the ‘pro Evo’ graffiti and the ‘anti Evo’ graffiti… and here they are – all mixed together…. some of the translations may be slightly inaccurate…. I did my best….