Ecuador, a country in debt, divided and hit by a pandemic, will elect the president this Sunday and everything indicates a second round between the conservative right and the left that longs to regain power to avenge the “persecution” of its leader Rafael Correa.
Yesterday, the small oil country lowered its curtain in a short and limited virus campaign. There are 16 candidates, but none have enough support, according to polls, to win the first round.
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However, poll preferences favor former 65-year-old banker Guillermo Laso and 35-year-old Andrés Arauz, the dolphin from Correa, the former popular president of Belgium who is pulling the strings to regain power for the nationalist left with a candidate hitherto unknown to the majority of the population.
Indigenous leader Yaku Pérez, 51, could appear between the two, who equally detest both and promise an environmental government that is reluctant to oil and mining companies.
Chaos and crisis are the words that are repeated among Ecuadorians. Without popular support, President Lenin Moreno gave up his request for re-election, leaving the competition open for his successor.
What’s at stake
Correa, who wanted to run for vice president, saw his aspiration cut short when Ecuadorian justice ratified it in 2020 as a last resort, and was sentenced to eight years in prison for corruption. He was then replaced by journalist Carlos Rabascall.
However, the former president is ubiquitous in the campaign. Arauz himself said that Correa would be an adviser to his government and that a series of legal proceedings could be reviewed against him.
“The possibility is open for Correa to return to the country very easily, because the political persecution that tried to bury him would stop,” analyst David Chávez, from the Central Public University, told AFP.
However, he said the correspondents “will make a serious mistake in trying to further dismantle the country’s institutions by forcing legal proceedings, putting pressure on people or revenge”.
For political scientist Esteban Nichols, of the Andean University Simón Bolívar, a possible victory for Arauz would mean “returning to the politics of friends and enemies.”
“The political logic will be that of the declared struggle against political enemies that are incubated in Correa’s mind,” said the professor, who considered Ecuador “in a state of chaos” with “a rather disorganized public policy.”
Right
Lasso, for the third time a candidate, is looking for the presidential band in tandem with doctor Alfredo Borrero. A natural ally of the Christian Social Party, the most conservative in the country, is the personification of anticorreism. He backed Moreno in a referendum that overturned the indeterminate re-election established in the Correa government, called Arauz’s proposals “failed recipes” and offered “a change of model.”
“Those who hope that Correismo will not return as well, as well as those who want a different policy, especially in economic terms, vote for Lasso,” political scientist Simón Pachano of the Faculty of Education told AFP. Social Sciences in Latin America (Flacso).
He recalled that “his status as a banker” generates “rejection” in Ecuadorians, especially because of the banking crisis of the late 1990s.
“This affects him, much more when there are people who consider that he was one of the architects” of the freezing of warehouses in Ecuador, he added.
Lasso denies responsibility for the crisis, which has cost the state about $ 8 billion.
Indigenous
Amid the polarization between correístas and anticorreístas, the figure of Yaku Pérez appeared, stimulated by the prominence that the indigenous movement took over in the October 2019 protests against the Moreno government.
Pérez, who also has a local political career as a leading colleague of biologist Virna Cedeño, “combines the old vote of the indigenous movement with that of the non-correist left and a number of other sectors, such as young people attracted to the speaking ecologist.” , Pachano explained.
He also considered the indigenous leader of the Pachakutik party a “surprise candidate” in the election.
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Election details
First round.
For a candidate to win in the first round, he must get at least 40% of the valid votes and a 10-point advantage over his immediate rival.
The dry law.
At midnight on Thursday, electoral silence will begin to govern – so advertising and candidate documents will be banned – and a dry law, which will last until noon next Monday.