2023-10-13 05:33:05
QUITO (AP) — Ecuador’s hottest political campaign, in which flags and proclamations were complemented by bulletproof vests, came to an end and Ecuadorians entered a period of electoral silence on Friday before going to the polls on Sunday to elect the president who will govern a country mired in violence.
After two weeks of intense political events, candidates Luisa González and Daniel Noboa will undergo the examination of the polls to see who inherits the mandate of Guillermo Lasso and assumes the reins of the turbulent South American nation from November 25 to November 24. May 2025.
The winner will have just a year and a half to try to get back on track with a situation that has consecutively broken its own records for violent deaths in the last two years and has put Ecuadorians on the podium of those who emigrate the most, along with Venezuelans and Haitians.
Daniel Noboa, of the National Democratic Action alliance and son of one of the richest men in the country, has the advantage in the polls in what is, at 35 years old, his first presidential elections.
At the helm is Luisa González, another debutant in the race for the Carondelet palace who, however, has the support of the experienced political platform of Rafael Correa, who governed Ecuador for ten years (2007-2017). The Citizen Revolution is risking its return to power.
González was the candidate with the most votes in the first round, with 33.61% of the votes, and Noboa gave the surprise by reaching the runoff with the popular support of 23.47% of Ecuadorians. Neither his seven rivals at the time nor the pollsters took him into account as a candidate with possibilities.
In contrast, facing the second round that will be decided at the polls in three days, Noboa minimally leads the voting intention, according to half a dozen polling firms.
The analyst and professor at the University of San Francisco, Luis Espinosa, in statements to The Associated Press, stated that these elections—beyond the violent context with the murder of a presidential candidate days before the first round—have passed “without any interest.” and less enthusiasm, because the candidates have not been able to generate any real proposal to solve the citizens’ problems.
The crime remains unsolved.
Among the challenges that the next ruler must face, Espinosa cites, are the deinstitutionalization of the main State organizations, to which is added an Assembly—whose members were elected on August 20—that is completely divided and “is not going to be able to contribute to governing and will not allow it to govern” as has been the practice in recent years.
“Economically the situation is disastrous,” emphasizes the professor. The future president will receive an Ecuador with a large debt, a high fiscal deficit, an inefficient public administration, minimal external investment and the executive’s reduced capacity for maneuver. “There are no miracles in economics,” he added.
And he pointed out that those who will pay the bill for this panorama “will be the citizens, those who pay taxes, but also citizens in general.”
This electoral period has taken place in the midst of an environment of widespread violence at all levels unleashed by criminal groups linked to drug trafficking, kidnapping and all kinds of crimes, but even more so by the murder, on August 9, of the candidate Fernando Villavicencio, when He was leaving a rally in the north of the capital. The crime still remains unsolved.
The deceased had revealed for years a series of acts of corruption, especially during the government of former president Rafael Correa (2007-2017), which ended in trials in which the former president himself and some of the most important former officials of the government were sentenced. that government.
The next government will last just a year and a half because the outgoing president Lasso dissolved the Assembly in May in the middle of a political trial once morest him, with which the law forced him to call new elections and leave office. The new president will simply serve out the remaining time that Lasso would have had left if he remained in power.
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