With 97.3% of the votes counted, Daniel Noboa Azin, son of one of the wealthiest men in Ecuador, was elected as the new president of the Andean nation on Sunday, October 15.
35-years old Daniel Noboa of the right-wing National Democratic Action (ADN) alliance, accepted his victory and thanked the Ecuadorian people for their confidence and for voting for him.
“Today we have made history. Ecuadorian families chose the New Ecuador. They chose a country with security and employment,” Noboa wrote on his X (formerly Twitter) account.
Noboa added that he looks forward to changing the country to a place “of realities where promises do not remain in the campaign and corruption is punished.”
The other candidate, Luisa González, ran for the left-wing Citizens Revolution Movement party (RC). She aspired to be the successor of former president Rafael Correa, who ruled Ecuador for ten years and managed to bring stability and prosperity to Ecuador.
Luisa Gonzalez congratulated president-elect Noboa and thanked the Ecuadorian people for their support.
On the same day of the elections, outgoing president Guillermo Lasso congratulated Noboa for his victory against the Citizen’s Revolution movement.
In May, Lasso cut his 4-year term short and implemented the Cross Death mechanism, a provision of the Ecuadorian constitution, which permits the president and the National Assembly to call for anticipated elections and ends the term of both Executive and Legislative powers in the country.
In the first round of these historic anticipated elections (August 20), the Citizens Revolution Movement swept the legislative side of the elections. The RC obtained 39.37% of the votes or 54 seats. However, the right-wing forces won the majority of seats in the unicameral parliament.
However, there were irregularities in the voting system for Ecuadorians living abroad. Last Sunday, a little over 400,000 Ecuadorians went to the polls to elect the president and vice president, as well as legislative representatives. There are still 21 National Assembly seats remaining to be allocated. The results will be official in the upcoming days.
Outgoing Guillermo Lasso is one of the wealthiest men in Ecuador, and used to be the president and shareholder of Banco de Guayaquil, one of the biggest banks in Ecuador. On November 25, he will give the presidential band to Daniel Noboa, the son and heir of a banana exporter, Alvaro Noboa, who had tried to be the president of Ecuador on five occasions.
The Lenin Moreno and Guillermo Lasso governments which came after Correa, were governments backed by the IMF and the World Bank and implemented a series of neoliberal policies that plunged Ecuador into the severe socio-economical and political crisis that it is suffering under today.
The Moreno-Lasso period is marked by two significant national strikes led by the Indigenous movement of Ecuador, one in October 2019 against Lenin Moreno and one in June 2022 against Guillermo Lasso.
As the socioeconomic situation has deteriorated, Ecuadorians have witnessed a sharp increase in insecurity, jail massacres, a rise in poverty and a shrinking of the State’s capacity due to an impressive budget cuts policy.
