The president of Ecuador, the conservative Daniel Noboa, overflow of votes. On Sunday, of the votes, almost 12 points more than his rival, his advantage was as overwhelming as unexpected. In the first round last February, only 17,000 votes separated him from González; Now, almost 1.2 million. While the leftist candidate practically stagnated, Noboa shot out. With this unusual support, one of the greatest of Ecuadorian democratic history, Noboa will begin a four -year mandate on May 24, the first complete; The current one will only last a year and a half, it will not have, however, a blank check. The consensus in Ecuador is that Noboa won more for the rejection of correism than for his own merits. The president has great challenges ahead, such as controlling violence, the highest in Latin America, and finding solutions to an economy in crisis.
The Ecuadorian economy did not walk well in 2024. GDP fell 2.5% “in an environment marked by the shortage of energy, high rates of violence and political uncertainty.” Consumption, industrial production and labor income fell. Poverty rose to 31.9%. Last May, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a 48 -month program for 4,000 million dollars for Ecuador, of which 1.5 billion arrived immediately. The World Bank hopes that, once the electoral issue and “a more stable offer of energy” are resolved as a result of the rains, the GDP rebounds 2.3%. This will depend, to a large extent, on Noboa’s ability to guarantee governance and, above all, control violence.
Ecuador today has a rate of 38.8 violent deaths every 100,000 inhabitants, the highest in Latin America. The insertion of drug trafficking, attracted by the ports and a dollarized economy that facilitates money laundering, grew exponentially during the last 10 years. : It militarized prisons and territories and requested logistics help from the United States. The results were rather lean, with January as the most violent month in the history of the country, with almost 900 homicides. Caroline Ávila, political and academic analyst, sees “a scenario similar to Lasso in 2021.” Its popularity grew to 90%, but lost it in three months because it then ran out of agenda. If Noboa has no concrete achievements in security in three months, he loses his agenda, “he warns.” The challenges are security and economy, “says Sebastián Hurtado, president of the profits political risk consultant.” Security remains the same as a year ago and I don’t see a clear strategy of Noboa to manage that. On the other hand, Ecuador’s GDP contracted and in 2025 it will have one of the worst performance of the region. The president will have to see how growth resolves, ”he says.
Yeah . The political scientist Jacobo García considers that this is the mother of all battles, especially since “Noboa lacks partisan structure and has in front of citizen revolution,” the movement of former president Rafael Correa, with a good presence in Parliament and now engaged in denouncing an electoral fraud. González did not recognize his defeat and on Sunday night he denounced a “grotesque electoral fraud” that he did not defend with evidence or endorsed by international observers. For Caroline Ávila, “the clamor of fraud is not associated with the vote vote, it is a complaint of structural fraud, of inclined court. The correism will serve to subtract him Noboa legitimacy. Correism may not give governance in the assembly because he considers him fraudulent.”
Can Noboa resist? Sebastián Hurtado sees a series of “positive” points to think so. “It will be easy for him to build a majority in the assembly, even with votes of the correism more beaten by the defeat, and advance with his reforms. A four -year mandate, in addition, will allow him to attract talent that was not available when he was only an interim president,” he says. For that, he adds, he will have to articulate as soon as possible “a clear and articulated political project. It does not reach the war against crime, but to know what his country project is.” Noboa already has the votes; He must now demonstrate that he has the ability to do so.
