A resounding failure for those who reaped it, held just seven months ago. Just as if he had just received the electoral support of Vargas Llosa himself. Jokes aside, the President of the Government of Ecuador, the liberal Daniel Noboa, crashed this Sunday at the polls in an event that he himself proposed and promoted in the form of holding a consultative referendum with four questions on which citizens had to decide with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’.
They were not issues of little significance or without interest, in fact, several of them involved breaking with political tradition and measures that were promoted through the citizen movement of a Correismo that came to govern Ecuador with a transformative accent. In the midst of a great spiral of violence within the framework of the tension of the fight against drug trafficking, Noboa submitted to popular consultation issues such as allowing foreign military bases to return to this country or forming a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution.
By greater or lesser distance, the four issues that were voted on yesterday in Ecuador – and in the countries that enabled voting centers for residents abroad, as in the case of Spain, with Madrid with the IFEMA – translated into a series of defeats for the Noboa Executive. And, indirectly, for the US. Precisely, the establishment of military bases in foreign countries had Washington as the main candidate, in the reissue of a past that goes back to ancient losses of national sovereignty to the detriment of US interests in the region.
‘No-boa’: no foreign bases, no new Constitution, no reduction of deputies or withdrawal of public funding from parties
Along these lines, the Ecuadorian president who has garnered support from different Western countries and, more specifically, within the scope of economic liberalism and neoliberalism such as Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has failed to garner support for her four proposals. The first was the aforementioned of the military bases, which has lost by 60.5% of ‘yes’ compared to 39.5% of ‘noes’, but the second was about obtaining support to form a Constituent Assembly with the objective of drafting a new Magna Carta – an issue similar to the process that occurred in Chile a few years ago and which resulted in a serious defeat for Gabriel Boric’s left.
The ‘no’ to commissioning a new wording to replace the 2008 one, with the pretext that the latter is “obsolete”, reached 61.55% of the votes, compared to 38.45% of those who do want to turn the page. Going towards a new Ecuadorian Constitution is a matter that has many double readings. But to understand it, it is worth remembering the past. The star promise of President Rafael Correa in the 2006 presidential elections was to create a new Magna Carta to replace the one of 1998, also through a Constituent Assembly that encountered obstacles in the legislative power of that time and was later resolved in a citizen consultation.
But Correa was running in those elections, which he won, against a well-known businessman and politician. Who? , who is the father of the current president, Daniel Noboa. Subsequently, in the referendum that Correa promoted to change the Magna Carta, he received the support of 81.72% of voters compared to 12.43%. The key to the drafting of that Constitution that replaced the 1998 one was the move to a more guaranteeing text supported by fundamental pillars such as the separation of functions into five areas (judicial, legislative and executive, in addition to electoral and transparency and social control).
In this case, Noboa proposed moving towards a Constitution based on the . In line with the electoral promises with which he achieved the electoral victory last April, the text would also open the door to economic and labor reforms, based on favoring the landing of investments from abroad in addition to making the labor market more flexible, for the sake of the creation of new jobs.
The voters, 80% of the 13.9 million in the census, have preferred to continue with a Constitution that expressly states that there will be no interference from other countries prohibiting military bases abroad and constraining the ability to influence Ecuador’s strategic economic sectors. But they have also said ‘no’ to two proposals that, a prioricould easily receive the support of the people by being understood as a reduction in the cost of politics. In fact, they were the two closest votes of the consultation.
In the referendum, they also voted on whether to reduce the number of parliamentarians, in an important adjustment that would mean going from the current 151 to 73. At the same time, and also with greater significance, they also voted on whether to withdraw public financing from political parties, a measure that in practice would mean that all of them would have to rely on private funds and their own collections from their members, regardless of the result they achieved at the polls. The latter, that of depriving public funds, garnered 57.96% ‘noes’ compared to 42.04% ‘yeses’. The reduction of parliamentarians ended with 53.41% against, compared to 46.59% who did want to scissor.
