For the Ecuadorian sociologist and political scientist Julio Echeverría, the main challenge for both will be credible to their proposal before the citizens, at a time when the divisions are on the rise and the next government must face an economic crisis and the violence of Dell Drug trafficking.
—Noboa and González were almost tied. Is it a more adjusted result than expected?
The starting point was the polarization of the electorate, but in the last part of the campaign he a lot to try to win in the first round. That produced the concentration of the vote around the two finalists. The useful vote theory began to work. That is, let’s vote for those who do have a chance to win. That concentrated the vote on the two finalists. The distance between them was very short. I think that explains a bit almost a draw between the two candidates.
—What do these results tell us how polarized Ecuador is?
I believe that this moment we live is a subject of study. Because, on the one hand, there is a strong resistance to correism and that is expressed in the vote towards Noboa. Let’s not forget that the president candidate has had to overcome a series of problems that would have caused significant wear. But, despite that, the result shows that it is a very resilient and very strong candidate who has managed to resist such attacks and position itself first. On the other hand, the result shows that correism does not end up disappearing and is strengthened with respect to the previous elections.
We will have to see what happens in the second round with this polarization. In the second round, many of the votes of the candidate Leonidas IZA, which is the one that represents the indigenous movement of Ecuador, will have to be distributed among the two candidates. And the vote of Andrea González, who appears fourth in this choice, will have to surely converge towards the anti-correse lines when she has a center-center posture and was neither with one nor with the other. It is likely, therefore, that much of that vote will be a null vote.
Daniel Noboa and Luisa González will play the presidency in Ecuador. (Photo: AFP)
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—What will be the biggest challenge of Noboa and González to overcome in the second round?
The main one is to return your proposal credible. At the immediate situation there are many problems that the government has to face. We have the problem of the energy crisis and that of insecurity, which are two very hot issues and that directly affect the government. And, therefore, the president will have to demonstrate greater clarity in these two lines of policy. And the same in the issue of the economy. You have to give clues that Ecuador can enter a new phase of economic and productive reactivation. It has had a good result in the issue of country risk fall, which has been a significant fall, which means that there is relative confidence of the markets and the international finance towards Ecuador. And that speaks well in favor of Noboa, but he will have to refine his work a lot in those three lines.
In the case of Luisa González, he has to better profile what he has tried to do in the final phase of this campaign with a positive result, which is distancing himself from the figure of Rafael Correa and demonstrating that he is an actor in his own voice. I think that the last moves in the González campaign have just signed up to try to present their own image, because in the first phase the great spokesman of the so -called citizen revolution remained Correa.
—If polarization has been part of the strategy of both movements, how does the weather foresee the second round?
A quite thin climate is expected because we have already seen that there is a very hard confrontation campaign, which could even run into what is called the dirty campaign. The use of social networks lends itself a lot for it. There could be a scenario of strong political instability. In the case of President Noboa, he will have to overcome some problems that have to do with the irregularities he has had at the time of requesting a license to intervene in the electoral campaign. It is now a much more extensive campaign period and will not be able to exercise the presidency. Noboa has a fairly difficult path to overcome, but has shown a lot of ability to be resilient and face conflicts.
“Are episodes of electoral violence fear?”
It is difficult to make a forecast in this regard because Ecuador is faced with a very high level of violence. And we have the presence of criminal gangs, drug trafficking, that is, we have pollution of politics with drug trafficking, and that makes the electoral campaign at high risk. So, it cannot be anticipated that it is a peaceful campaign completely. Some kind of political violence could be given and it would be expected that that does not happen.
