Ecuador has been in permanent electoral campaign since May 2023, when. Having allegedly tolerated an alleged embezzlement in a state company was at the root of everything. There were elections, their successor won them, but now it is when the country has to really go to the polls to find a president for the 2025-2029 period.
In these months, nor Noboa has really managed nor has there been room for debate, because electoralism has swept everything. This Sunday comes the time of truth, the choice of citizens in the first round. If no applicant wins half plus one of the votes or achieves 40% of the votes but arguing at 10 points to his persecutor will have to go to a second round, on April 13.
This is what the surveys predict right now, which give Noboa National Democratic Action (DNA) as a winner, but without sufficient majority so that this “one round” of the rallies come true. The 2023 stage would be reissued, because its main opponent is, of the leftist Citizen Revolution, the one chosen by Correism, by the defenders of former president Rafael Correa (in office between 2007 and 2017), who lives in Belgium because he has pending convictions For corruption.
The past weighs in the two main candidates, which according to the surveys will add 70% of the votes, and that is a ballast and a brand. Both have polarized society in a “with me or against me” between Correism and Anticorreism that is going to mark the day. In the background, records of record violence: January has been the worst month in 15 years, 750 cases according to police data, for example. Palea between bands for drug control, and especially, which arrives from Colombia (40% of the total) and leaves to the United States or Europe from Ecuadorian ports, is bleeding the country.
In 2023 the highest homicide rate in Latin America was recorded and that is why the country lives its first elections under the state of “internal armed conflict” declared early 2024 by Noboa.
What the surveys say for this first round is that Noboa will be the winner. At the end of January that the rightist would be made with 41% of the votes, compared to 27% of González, but in recent days both have grown: up to 45.3% he, up to 31.3%, she . Only Patriotic Society of the environmentalist Andrea González, among the other 14 lists presented to these elections, would exceed 2% of the votes; In your case, it would stay between 3 and 5% of the total. The two González are, by the way, the only two women from among 16 presidency applicants.
With this scenario, there would be second round, for which the formal electoral campaign would begin on March 24. In 2023, Noboa won González in this second round With 52% of wills.
President Daniel Noboa in the Military Fort Heroes de Chacras during a campaign act, on January 5, 2025 in Santa Elena (Ecuador).
The right: Noboa
Daniel Roy Gilchrist Noboa Azín (Miami, November 30, 1987) is one of the world’s younger leaders: he is now 37 years old and assumed the position with 35 barely. Ecuadorian-American, comes from one of the families with the greatest economic and political power in the country. His parents are Álvaro Noboa, the richest man in Ecuador and presidential candidate five times, and Dr. Annabella Azín, who has also been deputy. In addition, he is grandson of businessmen and descendant of Diego Noboa, president between 1850 and 1851.
None of that is his merit or demerit, but all that defines it. He is a rich child and does not blush for it. Millionaire, athlete, millionaire, Catholic, very active in social and populist networks, jumped to replace Lasso with a meteoric ascent. His entire career had oriented her to the company, with studies in New York or Harvard, but was elected as an assemblyman in the 2021 legislative elections. Since then, she was very well recognized among the right.
When the early elections arrived, it was well located. He kneaded support with a spectacular offensive against the narco that included the militarization of the country, the beginning of the construction of prisons (a huge focus of violence) and the exhibition of semi -naked prisoners, which has earned him comparisons with his Salvadoran counterpart ,.
Public interventions does not do many, he does not want to speak in public or attend to the press, but he likes to appear with uniformed, soldiers and police, to explain special operations against drugs. The hard hand has been his sign in these months, also when it occurred.
However, 60%of Ecuadorians continue to say that lack of security is the second problem in the country, only behind unemployment (67%) and followed by financial and political corruption (39%) and poverty and poverty and Inequality (26%).
The candidate promises “order, dignity, opportunities for young people, security, employment and health”, and has as an added challenge to the legislative, now in the hands of the opponents that are, he says, those who do not let him advance in his policies . “A new cycle,” he usually repeats. For now, prices have not lowered, but VAT has risen and security continues to shine by its absence. In his favor, which has brought together the entire movement contrary to correism, of diverse trends, because it is the strongest to defeat it.
The presidential candidate of Ecuador Luisa González, during a rally in the Daule driver union on January 23, 2025.
The left: González
Luisa Magdalena González Alcívar (Quito, November 22, 1977) has little to do with Noboa. This lawyer and economist (studied at the Complutense University of Madrid) is a cyclist, marathon and tattoos lover and, above all, defends the look of the left to achieve “social justice.”
Since the Government of Ecuador is not a socialist, he says, “we were sowed hate and sowed division and polarization because divided could dominate us and have us as today: depressed, without our rights,” said the candidate. Evangelical and 47, continually faces questions about the weight that Correa would have in his government, sentenced in the absence of eight years in prison for corruption. “I am the candidate (…). Who will rule will be Luisa González,” he declares sharp.
Its movement, citizen revolution, has not touched national power for eight years and there is much pressure on it. On the one hand, so that the correism returns to its fueros. On the other, so that the belt is just unmarked and manage from progressivism but allow the ex -president to return to the country and be forgiven. Still Correa and their ideology have an important support and popular roots, although among the lefts it wants to resurface the indigenous movement with Leonidas IZA.
In his campaign, González’s message has been more social than Noboa’s. “We don’t resist anymore,” he lamented. “But the hope of better days comes,” he promises, in front of the “indolent, full of whims and vanities” that work for the powerful. “The improvement of public services is one of their main promises.
There is only one thing in which the two main candidates coincide: dollarization. Both have expressed their support to keep the American currency as the only legal tender in the country, adopted in 2000 and dispense with the Sucre, in search of greater monetary and inflationary stability. As far as the two will collide in the new legislature, it will be in the possibility of a constitutional reform. Noboa wants her because she says Correa manipulated the text for her benefit and you have to change it. Not so González. A constituent could further alter political climate.
EFE will also depend on the election outcome, the future of the unpopular economic reforms undertaken by the Noboa administration to balance the public accounts of Ecuador, under the protection of a credit program of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which implied the Tax rise such as VAT (Value Added Tax), from 12% to 15%, and the reduction of subsidies to the most consumed gasoline.
A bureaucratic tangle
The campaign has also been marked by several bureaucratic tangles. One implies the Noboa candidacy itself and the other, its temporary substitution as a president while, at the same time, aspiring presidency.
As EFE explains, although the possibility that Noboa seeks re -election is allowed, the regulations mark that the president must request a license and distance to charge throughout the electoral campaign, something that the current head of state has partially made, by “absent “From the presidency only in the days where he has had electoral activities. A few days he has taken the shirt of his National Democratic Action Party (DNA) and in others he has put the president’s suit.
Veronica Abad, vice president of Ecuador, greeting from the balcony of the presidential palace after accessing the position, on November 28, 2023.
In addition, during the campaign, Noboa had to temporarily delegate the presidency in his vice president, Verónica Abad, with whom she is faced. Therefore, he appointed by decree as “Vice President in charge” of Cynthia Gellibert, the Secretary of Public Administration and Cabinet of the Presidency, whom he has delegated the Head of the State in the days he campaigned. This step has been declared unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court, which gave Abad as the sole authority to replace the president.
The noise came from further back: one of the first controversies of these elections was the disqualification as a candidate of the former lens specialized in safety Jan Topic, who was outlined as a rival with serious possibilities of subtracting votes from Noboa. His candidacy was challenged for having contracts with the State. The Contentious Electoral Court (TCE) left him out of the race based on cases “reserved reports” of the Tax Administration.
Now, 13.7 million Ecuadorians have the decision in their hands, starting with this Sunday.
