The president of Ecuador, the conservative Daniel Noboa, overflows with votes. Sunday, Obtained ri -elezione in a second electoral round with 56% Votes, almost 12 points more than their rival, Luisa González runs it. His advantage was overwhelming as unexpected. In the first round of last February, only 17,000 votes separated it from González; Now, almost 1.2 million. While the left -wing candidate stood practically, Noboa launched. With this unusual support, one of the greatest in Ecuadorian democratic history, Noboa will begin a four -year mandate on May 24, the first complete; The current one will last only a year and a half, The time that removed his predecessor, Guillermo Lasso. However, a white check will not have. The consent in Ecuador is that Noboa won more for the refusal of Correism than for its merits. The president has great challenges in sight, such as the control of violence, the highest in Latin America and the search for solutions to an economy in crisis.
The Ecuadorian economy did not walk well in 2024. According to the latest report of the World Bank, The GDP descended by 2.5% “in an environment marked by the lack of energy, high rates of violence and political uncertainty”. Consumption, industrial production and work income have decreased. Poverty rose to 31.9%. Last May, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved a 48 -month program for $ 4,000 million for Ecuador, of which 1.5 billion arrived immediately. The World Bank hopes that, once the electoral question and “a more stable energy offer” are resolved following the rains, the GDP rebound of 2.3%. This will depend, to a large extent, on the noboa ability to guarantee governance and, above all, to control violence.
Ecuador today has a rate of 38.8 violent deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, the highest in Latin America. The insertion of drug trafficking, attracted by ports and an economy in dollars that facilitates money laundering, has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. Noboa has applied since the beginning of his hard hand mandate: Prisons and militarized territories and requested logistical aid from the United States. The results were rather slender, with January like the most violent month in the history of the country, with almost 900 murders. Caroline ávila, political and academic analyst, sees “a scenario similar to Lazo in 2021”. His popularity grew to 90%, but he lost it in three months because he has exhausted the agenda. If Noboa has no concrete results in safety in three months, he loses his agenda “, he warns”. The challenges are security and the economy “, says Sebastián Hurtado, president of the political risk consultant”. Safety remains the same as a year ago and I don’t see a clear noboa strategy to manage it. On the other hand, Ecuador’s GDP has contracted and in 2025 will have one of the worst performances in the region. The president will have to see how growth is resolved, “he says.
AND Noboa finds no short -term solutions, what will be at risk is governance. The political scientist Jacobo García considers that this is the mother of all the battles, above all because “Noboa lacks a partisan structure and faces the revolution of citizens”, the movement of the former president Rafael Correa, with a good presence in Parliament and now committed to denouncing an electoral fraudule. González did not recognize his defeat and on Sunday evening he denounced a “grotesque electoral fraud” which he did not defend with evidence or approved by international observers. For Caroline ávila, “the clamor of the fraud is not associated with the vote of the vote, it is a complaint of structural fraud, of the inclined court. Correism will serve to subtract the legitimacy of Noboa. Coreism may not give governance to the Assembly because it allows it to fraudulent.”
Could noboa resist? Sebastián Hurtado sees a series of “positive” points to think so. “It will be easy for him to build the majority in the assembly, even with the votes of the more beaten by the defeat and advance with his reforms. A four -year mandate, moreover, will allow him to attract talent that was not available when he was only an interim president,” he says. For this, he adds, he will have to articulate as soon as possible “a clear and articulated political project. He does not reach the war against crime, but to know what his country project is”. Noboa already has votes; Now he must demonstrate that he has the ability to do it.
