The world should watch Ecuador’s April 11 presidential runoff closely to ensure no foul play, whether internal or external, disrupts the election or subverts the will of Ecuadorian voters.
Luis Ortiz
Political analyst, development consultant former counselor for Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile at the Board of Directors of the Inter-American Development Bank (2009–2017)
Ecuador's presidential candidate Andres Arauz gestures as he attends a closing campaign rally, in Guayaquil, Ecuador April 7, 2021 [Santiago Arcos/Reuters]
On April 11, the small South American nation of Ecuador – home to the Galapagos Islands and one of the oldest civilisations in the Western Hemisphere – is set to hold a presidential runoff pitting a greying member of the country’s financial elite, Guillermo Lasso, against 36-year-old Andrés Arauz, a progressive US-trained economist.
Arauz won the election’s first round with a 13-point lead over Lasso, and recent polling suggests that he could win the runoff by a landslide. Yet a fraught electoral process, foreign interference, and an avalanche of fake news threatens to derail Arauz’s candidacy and imperils the runoff election.
That Arauz won the first round by a wide margin is hardly surprising. While still in his 20s, the young economist played an important role in developing and executing popular government programmes during the administration of Rafael Correa (2007-17), which oversaw a period of dramatic social progress. Under Correa, poverty was reduced by 38 percent, extreme poverty by 47 percent, and inequality by almost 10 percent (as measured by the Gini coefficient).
Correa’s confrontational style and numerous clashes with the owners of large media companies and private banks earned him powerful enemies and a steady stream of negative media coverage, but did not seem to dampen his popularity. He was re-elected twice in massive landslides. In his last election, in 2013, he won by a margin of nearly 35 points against the runner-up, who happened to be Guillermo Lasso, a conservative banker.
It now appears that history will repeat itself, with Arauz widely expected to trounce Lasso at the polls. After four years of austerity and the repression of popular movements under President Lenín Moreno, the majority of Ecuadorians appear eager to support a return to progressive governance. Moreover, Arauz has a less confrontational approach to politics than Correa, and has reached out earnestly to Indigenous groups and to those who voted for the rival left-leaning Social Democratic Party. His plan to build an inclusive national coalition to tackle climate change, poverty, and social exclusion seems to have resonated with much of the population.
But dark clouds are gathering over Ecuador’s elections. A leading Ecuadorian newspaper recently published a call for the military to intervene to prevent the victory of a “Correista”, and some prominent public figures have echoed these appeals. This is particularly troubling in a country that has suffered numerous military coups, and in a region where military involvement in politics has been making a comeback (see, for instance, the role of the Bolivian military in the removal of Evo Morales in 2019, and the Brazilian military’s current involvement in the government of Jair Bolsonaro).
More:
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/4/9/ecuador-elections-3
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