Election of the day: Ecuador

Ecuadorians choose their next president today, as well as the next national assembly. Or at least their top 2: if no candidate wins over 50% (or over 40% with a lead of 10 points or greater) there will be a run-off in April. For the national assembly: 15 of the 137 seats are elected via a national PR list, and 116 are distributed proportionally among the 24 provinces, elected by a mix of FPTP and PR. The six remaining seats, elected nationally, are reserved for Afro-Ecuadorians, members of indigenous groups, and other national minorities, elected via a separate national election. Voting is mandatory in Ecuador for citizens between the ages of 18-64, and non-voters are subject to a fine. (Voting is optional for 16-17 and 65+ year olds.)

Ecuador finds itself in a number of overlapping crises. The largest, which has dominated this election season, is crime. While many countries saw some increase in violent crime during and in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, few can compete with Ecuador on that front. In large part due to increased drug gang activity, Ecuador went from being a relatively safe country as recently as 2018 to a country with dysfunctional Central American levels of violent crime and murder in recent years. The homicide rate in 2023 was almost 10 times the homicide rate in 2018. It was down a little in 2024, but the crisis is far from over. A particularly dramatic moment occurred in January of 2024, when a group of armed gunmen attacked a Guayaquil television station during a live broadcast. This incident, along with a surge in crime following the escape from prison of a couple of drug gang leaders, motivated new president Noboa (running for a full term today) to declare an “internal armed conflict” which triggered something like martial law powers, and increased military presence in prisons and on city streets. He also designed 20 drug gangs as terrorist organizations. This produced a drop in violent crime in the immediate aftermath, but it wouldn’t last, as crime jumped back up in the second half of 2024. January 2025 saw more homicides and violence than any month in the last three years. Another major issue in this election is electricity; Ecuador relies on hydropower for a majority of their electricity which left them susceptible to drought. Prolonged blackouts substantially impacted life for millions of Ecuadorians, damaging both education and many economic activities.

While there is a long list of candidates, only two appear to have significant support: Daniel Noboa, the president since the 2023 snap election, and Luisa Gonzalez, a former protege of disgraced former president Rafeal Correa, who represents the left-wing party Citizen Revolution Movement. His predecessor, Guillermo Lasso, invoked the muerte cruzada clause of the constitution, which dissolves the assembly and triggers a snap election, to avoid an impending impeachment. (He did not run in the snap election.) Noboa’s victory was a bit of an upset, both in the first round and the second (where he defeated Gonzalez by less than 4 points). He leads a political coalition with little ideological coherence, beyond supporting him. He shares some characteristics with right-wing populism, while not exactly fitting the mold in other ways. The son of a wealthy banana magnate and perennial unsuccessful political candidate Alvaro Noboa, he has studied at or taken degrees from Harvard, Northwestern, NYU, and GWU. (His degree from GWU was a MA in political communication; he hired one of his professors, Roberto Izurieta, to be his current press secretary.) He attracted the support of some centrist/center-right political coalitions in his 2023 campaign. His rule has been filled with controversy; in addition to the internal armed conflict declaration, he ordered a raid on the Mexican Embassy, with the goal of arresting Jorge Glas, a former vice president convicted of corruption charges, who’d been avoiding his sentence by seeking asylum in the Mexican embassy. This was a pretty clear violation of international law, and led to the cessation of diplomatic relations with Mexico as well as Nicaragua and Venezuela. He’s also been criticized for what has become known as the “Malvinas” case in which several Afro-Ecuadorian youths, last seen being questioned by military personnel acting as police about a robbery, disappeared. Their incinerated bodies were later found outside an Air Force Base.

So the election comes down to an establishment leftist and a center-rightish incumbent with some mild to moderate anti-democratic tendencies. It’s a bit more complicated than that in some ways, for example Noboa appears to be more supportive of LGBT rights than his opponent, who has evangelical roots. Another interesting wrinkle has been Noboa’s ongoing conflict with his vice president, Veronica Abad Rojas, a deranged Trumper who has been in conflict with Noboa during their entire term. (Noboa also remains on good terms with Trump, going so far as make a legally dubious offer to accept Venezuelan deportees from the US.) Noboa managed to get her temporarily suspended for failing to comply with his order to leave Israel back in September; she was reinstated by a judge a few months later. In Ecuador, incumbent presidents are required to either refrain from actively campaigning or hand over significant governing authority to their vice president during the campaign. Noboa had been simply ignoring that law until last week, when a court ordered him to comply. He did follow the court order, but instead of turning over any significant power to Rojas, he simply cancelled remaining campaign events. (Unsurprisingly he’s got a different running mate this time.) Despite all this, he is widely seen to be favored (the polling I’ve seen looks like more of a toss-up, or at least suggests significant uncertainty, but Noboa outperformed polling in both 2023 elections and CW seems to read it as clearly favoring Noboa. The coverage I’ve seen suggests Noboa is still benefiting from a kind of outsider status, and his willingness to take extreme steps to deal with the crime problem is appreciated, even as results so far have been unremarkable.

We should have some sense of where this is going in a few hours, when exit polls are released.